Introduction

Working partnerships: Better research and learning

Morwenna Griffiths and Graham Impey

We think some of the best, most productive, longest lived, and most useful educational developments come about through partnership. But partnerships are much easier to talk about than to do. They are also very difficult to keep going. The truth is that partnerships do not always work well, though the recommendations and policies of those involved in education, especially policy makers and decision makers at every level, often give the impression that partnerships can be set up and made to work easily, perhaps following a few simple guidelines. The impression is given that all kinds of desirable outcomes can be achieved by ‘getting into partnership’ - as if the ‘getting into partnership’ is the easy part of the process, and as if there are few drawbacks to be taken into account.

The situation is made more difficult by the existence of some confusion over what ‘partnership’1 means. This confusion is not surprising because the word ‘partnership’ is used to cover a myriad of different relationships, even just within the area of school-university partnerships, which is the subject of this book. This variation occurs both within national boundaries, and also, and as is to be expected, there is variation across them. For instance, in university Departments of Education to see partnership as just what goes on in relation to mentoring in ITT (initial teacher training). Indeed, in early discussions about this book in our university, some colleagues thought that what they were doing was not ‘partnership’ because it was not within ITT, although they plainly were working closely together with schools.

So is this book just more of that easy talk about partnership - instead of the more difficult doing of it? We think not! The idea behind the book is the belief that if we are, collectively, going to get better at doing partnership, we should start by understanding what 1 We make no attempt to distinguish ‘partnership’ from ‘collaboration’. We are using the term quite generally, as we think it is in fact used in everyday discussions of educational practice.

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works (and what does not) and what is worth doing. We believe that what is needed is more honest appraisal of real partnerships, what made them work (if they did) and what made them valuable (if they were). So we have in this book a number of accounts of partnerships which do just that.

We are conscious that this book is written almost entirely by the university side of partnership. So we realise that it must have a inherent bias towards the university experience and perspective on partnership. One reason for this is the severely practical constraint that there is much more motivation for university-based people to write: writing is one of the primary aspects of an academic’s job. And writing contributes to individual academics’ careers and helps improve the standing of their universities. Not surprisingly there is more space and more time given to them to do it, in comparison with their colleagues in schools and Education offices. But it would be much better to have the other perspectives. So our intention is that this should be the ‘first edition’ of this book. We hope that the partners’ voices will be included in a second edition, and will appear either before, after or interwoven with each of the university based accounts.

This book is itself a contribution to the ethos of partnership: that the education of children and students needs all of us educators to work together. So the book is intended for anyone in the educational world who is wanting to get into school and university partnerships, or to improve ones that they are in now. It is also for those who are involved in making policy rooted in the existence of partnership. Such people include schoolteachers, school mentors, headteachers2, managers, university tutors, governors, local education policy makers and central government. This book should be readable by any professional involved in education because it makes use of the attractiveness and accessibility of real stories of living, human, professional relationships with all their tensions, struggles, delights and commitments. But taken as a whole the stories are more than the sum of the parts. These stories, placed within the frame of the wider context of making partnerships work, make more sense collectively than they could do singly.

This collection will also interest anyone theorising partnership. The theoretical assumptions underlying the practical content are clear but they are kept in the background as a frame rather than fore-grounded for discussion. While much of the book relies on narrative

2 ‘Headteachers’ in England are the equivalent of ‘Principals’ in the United States.

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and example, but these are grounded in rigorous research arising from various methodological traditions, notably qualitative case-study, action research, self-study3, interventions and interview surveys.

A glance at the contents page shows that although the book springs from two editors based in a university in England, contributions have come from other parts of the English speaking world: the United States, Canada, South Africa and Malta (where English is widely spoken although it is a second language). The international flavour of the book is important because it gives us, the readers and writers, an opportunity to escape the particular powerful, but often short-lived, constraints and concerns of our own governments, local governments and other policy makers, and reminds us that the increasing emphasis on school-university partnership is an international phenomenon. Moreover it reminds us that in the UK, as in most countries, ‘partnership’ covers a wide range of models and modes which were established well before current government interventions in the UK and elsewhere (Furlong et al. 2000, Johnston et al, 1997, Holmes Group, 1986). However, the contemporary rhetoric of partnership, especially from governments, is in danger of ignoring this lovely variety. It is also in danger of ignoring the tensions that must be recognized before partnership can work (Somekh, 1994, Johnston et al, 1997). If they do not seek to learn what works in partnership (and why), they may miss the opportunities that partnership gives: better educational research and more effective learning for us all, children, students and educators.

Thus, in short, the book has the following aims:

To put into question the easy reliance on partnership rhetoric from various arms of government, including the Teacher Training Agency and Department for Education and Employment in England and Wales, and their equivalents in other countries. To tell stories of partnership between universities and schools, new and established, successful and problematic, all of them focused on better research and learning. To improve the chances of partnerships working: to inspire and warn, and so to help future partnerships flourish.

3 Some of the chapters started life as contributions to the bi-ennial international Conference of the American Educational Research Association Special Interest Group in Self-Study in Teacher Education, 2000:http://educ.queensu.ca/~ar/sstep3

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The book has been organised into three parts to make it easier for the reader. It begins with, Part 1, ‘Partnerships in Context’. The chapters in this part discuss the context in which school-university partnerships can be set up in the cases of the United Kingdom, the United States. Chapter 3 addresses links between the so-called ‘developed’ and the ‘developing’ world (such as between the UK and South Africa). In Part 2, ‘Processes in Partnerships’, the chapters focus on the details of processes at various stages, from beginning, through established partnerships to those reaching towards extension into the long-term. These accounts of partnerships come from Canada, Malta, the USA and the UK. Finally, in Part 3, ‘Some Successful Outcomes’, there are three accounts of partnership. All of these pay explicit attention to the processes which underpin the partnerships, but they also emphasise the outcomes and how these processes have depended on the particular partnerships described. These three chapters, like the ones in Part 2, move from beginning, through established, to long-term partnership.

We would like to say something about how this book came to be written. It has come about because of our own research-related activities in the university. We are jointly responsible for supporting research in the Primary Department, and so we have had opportunities to explore our overlapping interests in school-university partnerships. In particular we have found common ground in our joint enthusiasm for the university funded Primary Partnership Projects scheme. Indeed, both of us have a long term interest in partnerships.

Recently, Griffiths has written on collaboration and partnership, from the point of view of epistemology and research methodology for example, in her book Educational Research for Social Justice (Griffiths, 1998), and most recently, in an article, ‘Collaboration and Partnership in Question’ (Griffiths, 2000). This kind of theorising does not appear in this book, but it contributed to it and also, it is important to say, arose directly from her experience of collaborating with educators outside the university. These experiences led her to seek out material on processes of partnership and to note the value of international comparisons. Indeed partnership is central to her views about educational research: one of the principles put forward in her book is (p.96):

Researchers need to work collaboratively with people as part of the community carrying out the research. It is difficult to establish hard and fast boundaries to this research community. Creating, establishing and working with such a diverse research community

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requires that all sectors respect and work with each other in conditions of trust and safety, in the interests of improving education. Impey has been responsible for organising and maintaining

partnerships of various kinds in the ITT and in-service programmes for which he is responsible, as well as for initiating the Primary Partnership programme, much of its design based on his earlier experiences, especially with the influential IT-INSET scheme in the eighties (Impey, 1986, 1987, 1989). The Faculty of Education in our university has a strong tradition of partnership with schools, colleges, business, and the community in general. This ethos underpins both teaching arrangements and also the kinds of research that are encouraged. The Primary Partnership Project (PPP) scheme is one example of this.

The PPP scheme funds a number of projects a year, each of which is set up as a partnership between the university and a school (or group of schools) The PPP was set up as part of the university’s Long Term Strategy Initiative, which allocated the Primary Department resources from the central university funds in recognition of the ‘outstanding quality and promise’ of the portfolio of partnership initiatives that are to be found in the Faculty in general and the Primary Department in particular. So the PPP was set up for a particular purpose, and within particular funding and institutional constraints – that is, it had to fit into the real world of budgets, management accountability and quality assurance mechanisms. At the same time it is founded in a vision and understanding of school-university partnerships and a belief in their potential value.

The university has allocated nearly £100,00 over five years to the Primary Department to support the development of the PPP scheme. The resource is treated as a fund to support Partnership Projects which are developed jointly by Department staff and colleagues in schools and which will benefit both partners and their partnership relationship, in a way that should directly benefit pupils in schools. Each proposed project can apply for modest funds for teacher/tutor release and sundry expenses (e.g. travel) up to a maximum of £3,000. In the first year (1998/9) there were six projects. By now, after two completed years, nearly twenty have been supported and the new set of proposals for this third year is soon to be assessed. The scheme is designed to serve several needs at once. That is, it provides staff development both for tutors in the university (through supporting work in a school on curriculum, pedagogical or management issues) and also for teachers

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in school (through their link with the specialist knowledge and skills of the tutor). It also adds another dimension to the relationship between participating schools and the Primary Department. Perhaps most importantly, it is intended as an enriching contribution to the quality of education offered within participating schools.

A number of features are key to the way the scheme works. Firstly, projects must be designed to contribute to enhancing the quality of education; be fully supported by the headteacher and governors; and involve collaboration between a departmental tutor and at least one teacher in the school. This collaboration must be in place before a final bid is made to the university for support. Teachers are funded for release from some teaching duties. They can also gain accreditation if they want through the Faculty’s CPD (Continuing Professional Development) in-service programme. Participating tutors have to take on certain responsibilities and are given some resources to help with carrying them out. Not only must they provide the support or assistance outlined in the bid, but also they must undertake to write, in collaboration with teacher colleagues where possible, a report on the project for publication in a professional or academic journal and for distribution to partnership schools. They also undertake to present a seminar to the Department on their project. In practice this has been at an annual conference organised for the purpose.

The reason that we think these are key features relates to the vision behind the scheme. Most importantly, the scheme is set up to empower teachers: they are not ‘done to’ by other partners who have their own agenda which requires partnership from teachers. On the contrary, the teachers set the agenda and also identify the particular kinds of help they need from the university. The teachers have to decide on the focus of the partnership project. However there must be a reason for doing it as a partnership with the university – other than the hope of getting some modest funds. And indeed in the first year it was apparent that some schools had approached us with just this sole aim of getting some funding (and very understandably so!) So this is the reason that the collaboration must be in place before the proposal is put forward. It is in order to embed the partnership in both university and school, while keeping the ownership in the school, that proposers have to approach the university (or a particular tutor in the university) before they can put in a full proposal.

Other features have also been built in and we think are significant in the success. First, there is a guarantee of continuing funding for five years. So a school can wait a year if that suits them, without

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losing their chance of joining. Also this continuing funding allows time for word of mouth to spread. Moreover it is possible for a successful project (or a not-yet-quite-successful project) to put in another bid for a continuation project. Second, there is a requirement for feedback and there are clear endpoints (and it is significant that we use the term is ‘endpoint’ rather than the fiercer ‘deadline’) without that requirement incorporating any heavy managerial features. There are no sanctions other than peer pressure and individual conscience. Instead the feedback has mostly been through conferences; a form which allows the personal enthusiasms and professional creativity of the partners to shine out. Our last conference could have been a sorry affair, taking place as it did amid widespread local flooding which could have deterred the participants travelling, as some of them did, a long distance to the campus. Far from being sorry, it was a very successful affair, indeed inspiriting. Third, and finally, we are sure that the opt-in ethos is essential. An occasional nightmare for us is that the success of this kind of venture might make some national (or even local) policy maker require such a partnership of schools. This would kill it stone dead, even with all the above arrangements.

We have described our context in some detail. School university partnerships in the UK are very various in their operation: how they extend any of the mandatory ITT partnerships in the institution, how they relate to the institutions of local government, and whether there is partnership with other bodies. Some of this is described in a recent report into partnerships for CPD (SCETT/ UEL, 2000) which says:

The richness and wide variety of CPD partnerships was strikingly evident from the…survey. (p.15)

We have made no attempt to describe the arrangements in other universities. In general, some universities are very partnership-friendly - though local constraints and histories will be different. In this context though we should mention the ‘Super’ project at Cambridge university which is a research partnership between the university and six secondary schools (Ebbutt, 2000). The chapter by Colleen McLaughlin is related to this project. Other arrangements do not work so well, leading, no doubt to the kind of suspicion of universities and university research expressed by some teachers, and also to the alienation from schools and school ways of doing things that can be expressed by some university tutors.

It is our hope that this book will contribute to the success of more partnerships world-wide. The chapters are based on evidence rather than rhetoric about processes underlying successful partnerships from

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the newest to ones that have been developed over years. So they constitute critically constructive work by people committed to getting partnerships to work and to work well. These are honest accounts: they are real, recognizable stories of partnership in all its variety - from triumph to tragedy and the stages in-between. But most importantly, the partnerships are set up to benefit learning in schools. So the reasons they are set up matter, and the practical results of particular partnerships are explained in the different chapters as crucial to understanding the success (or otherwise) of particular ventures.

REFERENCES

Ebbutt, D (2000) The development of a research culture in secondary schools. Paper presented to the European Conference on Educational Research, Edinburgh, SeptemberFurlong, J et al. (2000), Teacher education in transition : re-forming professionalism? Buckingham: Open UniversityGriffiths, M (1998) Educational Research for Social Justice: Getting Off the Fence Buckingham: Open UniversityGriffiths, M (2000) Collaboration and partnership in question: knowledge, practice and politics Journal of Education Policy Special Issue: Philosophical perspectives on education policy, 15 (4) 2000 , 383-395Impey, G (1986) Partnership in Leicestershire Leicester: Leicester UniversityImpey, G and Randall, R (1987) Talking Points – A Resource for school-based INSET Schoolbase PublicationsImpey, G and Everton, T (1989) Partnership in training: the Leicestershire experience of IT-INSET London: David FultonJohnston, M et al. (1997) Contradictions in collaboration : new thinking on school/university partnerships, New York and London: Teachers College PressHolmes Group (1986) A report of the Holmes Group East Lansing, MI: The Holmes GroupSomekh, (1994) Inhabiting each other’s castles: towards knowledge and mutual growth through collaboration, Educational Action Research, 2 (3) 357-381SCETT/UEL (Standing Committee for the Education and Training of Teachers and the University of East London) (2000) Partnerships in Continuing Professional Development, London: UEL/SCETT

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PART ONE:

PARTNERSHIPS IN CONTEXT

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Chapter 1

Research Partnerships in Education: an uneasy relationship?

Philip Garner

INTRODUCTION

This chapter examines some of the questions raised by the ‘new’ climate of partnership between educational researchers and teachers in the United Kingdom. In particular, it explores the viewpoints of a group of teachers about research in general, and those who are seen to be principally involved in it. The distinction between ‘research’ and the ‘real world’ of the classroom is somewhat more blurred than current debates about the practical value of educational research per se appear to acknowledge. Nevertheless, there is a commonly held belief that the rapid changes that have taken place in schools since the Education Act of 19881 have been paralleled by changes in the way in which teacher education (both initial training and in-service professional development) is structured, with ‘the vast majority of courses…being organised through some form of partnership’ (Furlong et al., 2000). One aspect of such partnership is the move towards the ‘teacher as researcher’ and a concerted attempt to establish awareness about research findings amongst teachers in general.

In considering this topic it is worth remembering that emerging partnerships, whether in research or teaching, have been instituted in a climate of considerable tension, between central government and those involved in teacher education, notably the institutions of higher education (HEI). The roots of the diffidence and even disengagement between the two have been apparent for many years but reached crisis point in the latter years of the Thatcher administration, with a series of concerted attacks on HEIs and those working in teacher education. To many commentators, the move towards partnership was born not out of a desire to enhance existing collaborative practice but, rather, out of

1 This Act was intended as a major reform of education by the then Conservative Government; since then there have been a series of major changes in schools in the UK.

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the political will of the Tory Right to undermine ‘fashionable theorists’ and their domination by ‘orthodoxies of the past’.

The general public, during this period of upheaval, were assiduously fed a diet of what is best described as propaganda. There is certainly justification for suggesting that, of all the post-1988 initiatives, those directed towards supposed ‘reform’ in teacher education are the most heavily predicated by the rhetoric of politicians and by the malevolent intent of the ‘New Right’. Both groups have expressed a view, verging on the hysterical, that teacher education remains dominated by ‘modish educational theory’. What is clear, however, is that the term ‘partnership’ was introduced into teacher education - in both teaching and research - on the basis of a belief that nothing of the kind existed previously. This flawed assumption hardly merits critical examination, given the rich history of collaboration between schools and HEIs in the past. Nevertheless it forms an important contextual backdrop for a consideration of research activity in education - and of teachers’ views of what are its shortcomings and benefits. An investigation of these would appear to be crucial to the task of establishing a set of common understandings about the nature and potential of ‘research in partnership’.

RESEARCH IN QUESTION

By the end of 1998 educational researchers working in HEIs in England and Wales had been left in little doubt that they had (re)entered a battle-zone. Their field was subject to continuing cuts in an already depleted resource base, whilst the pressure on them to respond to widespread change within the education sector gave rise to a real risk that the capacity of educational researchers to produce ‘worthwhile knowledge’ would be seriously depleted. The practice of educational research was, at the end of the 1990s, under considerable threat (Hammersley, 1997). Whilst this was not a new experience for educational researchers (Nisbet and Broadfoot, 1980), the 1990s had marked a period of considerable debate regarding the ‘value-for-money’ delivered by this area of research activity. Thus, Elliott (1990), Gray (1993) and Ranson (1995) had highlighted areas of concern, whilst David Hargreaves’s lecture to the Teacher Training Agency (TTA) in 1996 was a signal point in what was becoming an increasingly polarised debate. Subsequently, two commissioned reports by Tooley and Darby (1998) and by Hillage et al. (1998) - for the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted) and the Department for

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Education and Employment (DfEE) respectively - brought the debate to fever pitch. The former included a provocative Foreword by the Chief Inspector of Schools, in which the published products of the enterprise of educational research were described as ‘at best no more than an irrelevance and distraction’.

In this most recent period the discussion has centred around several key themes. Principally these have included:

The research agenda and focus Funding and value for money Links between theory and practice ‘Partisanship’ Involvement of user communities Problems of methodology ‘Good practice’ in educational research Dissemination

Both the ‘Tooley’ and ‘Hillage’ reports concentrated their focus on these concerns, with the emphasis being placed on discussion of what constitutes ‘useful’ educational research from the perspective of teachers in schools. Teachers were increasingly being seen as key players in the debate, not simply as passive consumers of the research product: the TTA, since 1996, has provided bursaries to teachers who wish to conduct small-scale research activity; the aim of this initiative has been to promote:

further exploration of and debate about education research, emphasising the need for it to focus on the classroom and the teacher’s role within it’ and the ‘engagement of teachers with research.’ (TTA, 1996: 2-3)

A current indication of this way of thinking is the present British Educational Research Association Annual Conference format, which for the first time in 1999 incorporated a designated opportunity for teachers to participate by reporting their research findings.

The relevance - and viability - of the teacher-as-researcher model is by no means a given, however. In summarising this orientation, for example, Tooley and Darby maintain that there are ‘...serious doubts about the efficacy of teachers-as-researchers to solve any of the problems ...’ (p. 75). Elsewhere, some of the pitfalls of this kind of involvement in research activity have been identified. Vulliamy and Webb (1992), for instance, warn that teachers may need to ‘fight familiarity’ if they are to remain objective. There are pressing ethical issues too, which have been effectively summarised by Beveridge (1995). Principally, these would include the extent to which individual

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informants (especially pupils) have the means to be able to refuse to participate in a study (Clough and Barton, 1995).

A parallel interpretation is of teaching as a research-based profession. In this mode, the practice of teaching is viewed as being informed by research findings which identify ‘solutions’ to particular problems, resulting in more effective pedagogy. Again, this is not a new development. Stenhouse (1985), in particular, regarded the function of educational research as providing:

a theory of educational practice testable by the experiments of teachers in classrooms...this calls for the development of the teacher as researcher’ (p. 29).

This descriptor was further emphasised by Hargreaves.But it is the notion of ‘impact’ of research activity in education

which was largely the preoccupation of writers such as Hargreaves and Tooley. Hargreaves’s account of the state of educational research proposes a set of connecting arguments: that educational researchers want their work to be judged on its impact, that educational research has little impact and, by deduction, there is something wrong with the research. The use of the term ‘impact’, in their terms, means the effect that research findings have on practice in the classroom. But even this bland description is far from unproblematic. Tooley and Darby vitiate its meaning by reducing the term to a more passive ‘relevance to practice’. Hillage et al, on the other hand, debate its meaning at length and conclude that ‘The process of impact is complex and multi-faceted, there is no simple model on which to frame an explanation’ (p. 45), and they go on to argue that research can exert an influence directly, cumulatively or indirectly. By indicating that ‘There is no simple model’ these authors develop the conclusion that ’...the impact of research (is) difficult to isolate and measure’.

Importantly, however, the three principal sources of recent criticism of educational research, some of whose views have been sketched in this opening section, have provided little evidence of any systematic approach to gathering data from teachers in schools. Thus, Hargreaves’s thesis relied on the views of a (small) group of teachers. His paper gave no indication of how accurate a reflection such judgements were, based upon the sampling procedure he adopted. Tooley and Darby simply reviewed a set of papers from a small selection of educational research journals. Although there was considerable debate (and criticism) concerning the lack of relevance of educational research, their report perversely omitted any defensible basis for their assumption that teachers regarded academic research as

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irrelevant or difficult to access. Similarly, the Hillage report utilised the responses of 23 teachers; no indication was given concerning the selection of this cohort, their background or their specific teaching context. In sum, these influential documents, which have arguably set the research agenda in education for the foreseeable future in the UK, were based on the kind of methodological approach which places them in stark contrast to the quality indicators identified by one of their number (Tooley and Darby, 1998).

It is against this background that the present study has been conducted. Whilst it may be viewed as problematic in the ‘quality’ terms identified by Hillage, Tooley, Hargreaves and others, it represents an attempt to deliver evidence of what teachers themselves think about the nature and impact of educational research. So, whilst an accusation of partisanship may never be far away, given my provenance as a university-based worker, the impetus for the study is more properly located within the emerging paradigm of ‘voice’ in educational research (Clough and Barton, 1998)). Here it is the unconditional acceptance of what teachers say about their lived experience which is important. This both delineates their identity and locates them as social actors within a process in which there is ‘no "true" nature of reality’ (Guba, 1990).

Returning to the criticisms of Hargreaves, what is presented here is one small-scale illustration of the involvement of a user-community in an evaluation of the effects of educational research. It represents a contribution to the development of the ‘serious dialogue’ (McIntyre, 1997) necessary to secure clarity in the work we do as researchers within an educational community.

The study reported in this chapter seeks to shed some light on questions made explicit in the present discussions regarding educational research from the perspective of a group of practising teachers. The research also sought to uncover the extent to which there was, amongst schoolteachers a discernible chronology in their regard for, and use of, the findings of educational research. This focus is prompted by the arguments, summarised by Hammersley that in the clinical practice of medicine:

the quality of clinical practice deteriorates over the course of the careers of practitioners. This is because they are dependent on the state of research knowledge when they trained, which becomes progressively outdated. (p. 151)

To this viewpoint needs to be added a second, validating statement: that teachers who are more experienced come to disassociate

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themselves from the theoretical underpinnings of their work, in favour of making decisions:

on the basis of social skills and partly on the basis of certain value commitments: both are encapsulated and rapidly processed in every routine classroom decision. (Hargreaves, 1979: 79)

The more experienced a teacher becomes the more reliant she will be on a repertoire of skills and strategies which have been used and ‘proven’ in the classroom. Much of this way of thinking, it should be noted, is at the heart of the apprenticeship model of school-based teacher training, an approach championed by Hargreaves himself (Hargreaves, 1990).

GATHERING TEACHERS’ PERSPECTIVES: A METHODOLOGY

Research FocusThe study reported in this chapter seeks to shed some light on questions made explicit in recent discussions regarding the appropriateness of the involvement of teachers in educational research from their own perspective. Its general aims are to uncover these teachers’ views focused on four principal issues:

educational research, educational researchers and the teacher-researcher

the impact of research conducted by teachers how to begin as a teacher-researcher the potential for research conducted by teachersThis work constitutes part of an initial attempt to gather data with

a view to formulating a methodologically more robust enquiry - and one which could be based on a larger and more representative sample. For instance, no personal or contextual details were requested from this small group of respondents. Thus, information was not sought relating to background, experience, attendance on long (especially award-bearing) courses. Each of these, it can be assumed, will play a part in helping to shape professional views regarding teachers who conduct research in school settings. So, whilst recognising the potential importance of these (and other) factors, this pilot work concentrated solely on teachers’ opinions regarding the efficacy of working in such a way.

Data gatheringData were gathered from a random sample of 24 interviewees chosen from two local education authorities (LEAs) in the south-east of

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England. Each of these teachers were interviewed using a semi-structured schedule which was devised to elicit information regarding the teacher’s views on each of the four principal research foci, as outlined above. The discussions were recorded for transcription. Full confidentiality was ensured by substituting all real names of persons or places, and amending any contextual information which might reveal a school’s location or a teacher’s identity. It was agreed that the transcript tapes would be destroyed at the conclusion of the study.

RESEARCHING TEACHER AND RESEARCH: A DATA OVERVIEW

A summary of the findings thus far is presented in this part of the chapter. What is clear, from the various data forthcoming from this small-scale enquiry, is the high level of awareness that the majority of these teachers have regarding the role (both positive and negative) of educational research in their lives. Thus, Bryony confirmed that ‘You’re always aware that there’s stuff going on out there, and it is very important to keep up-to-date’; echoing this view is that of Kate, who believed that ‘Things were very different when I was starting out in teaching [because]…it was very…seldom…not at all, really…that I heard - as a classroom teacher - anything about it [research]. Now I think it is an important part of being a professional.’ Such views appear to confirm those of Everton, Galton and Fell (2000) who indicate a high percentage of practising teachers are either utilising, or aware of educational research.

With respect to each of the four main areas of enquiry covered in the interviews, these teachers, whilst recognising that ‘research is important’, provide some evidence that they are tentative in assuming the identity of a ‘teacher-as-researcher’. On the other hand, they suggest that the classroom teacher (in particular) is uniquely placed to engage in practice-related research, providing there is an infrastructure of support. In the absence of this (in whatever form it might take), there is a common belief that ‘professional researchers’ (a term provided by one respondent) are better placed to undertake this activity.

Turning then to each of the four main issues, the key points of emphasis, as indicated subsequent to a content analysis of the transcripts, are now highlighted; each is illustrated by indicative comments from the teachers.

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Views regarding the role of the teacher in educational researchThis group of teachers were ambivalent in their opinion about the role of teachers in general in educational research. These data suggest that they feel uncertain about their position for a number of reasons:

Research has little impact on teachingI’m pretty unsure about its [research] effect on what I do in the classroom. Sure, I’ll read stuff and think…yes…that’s quite interesting. But it’s not a consideration when I’m getting on with my teaching. (Usha)

The formal responsibility for this ‘new’ role has not been negotiated…no-body thought to ask us [teachers] about it [research]…so…once again there’s this new idea…new initiative (and) we’ll just get on with it. (Robert)

Teachers are teachers of children primarilyI got into teaching…after doing other things…to be a teacher. My role was already settled in my mind. I wanted to be a good teacher. It went no further than that…[but] now there’s this other thing [research]. (Gill)

Research is better left to those in universities (etc)Some people are trained to build houses, or to sell things. I teach…researchers research. They do that job…I suppose…well. (Nathan)

On the other hand, there was a body of opinion which indicated that involvement in research was an important professional responsibility:

It helped inform what teachers doI think some research findings have helped me in the past and will probably influence me again in the years to come… (Wendy)

It gives insights into how and what children learnYou’ve got to take a broader view…research…finding out…gives us information so that we do our jobs a bit better...You mustn’t have a closed mind to it. (Dee)

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It helps promote the professionI think we have to accept that being associated with research is good for the profession. I wouldn’t think much of a doctor who prescribed me drugs that research proved were useless…or bad. (Amy)

Content analysis of data obtained from this section of the interview, summarised above, shows that this group of teachers are mainly uncertain about ‘research’ as a component of the work that teachers do. More than half of the teachers made comments which implied that they felt ‘disconnected’ with the activity of educational research; the same proportion expressed concern that no overall professional protocol governed their involvement in classroom research. For the majority these were the two key inhibiting factors in developing a positive view of the role of teacher-as-researcher.

Views regarding the impact of research conducted by teachersTeachers in general seem unsure as to the true impact of research findings in their classroom teaching, a view which seems oppositional to the general findings of Everton et al. (2000) Their view is that much educational research is removed from practice, and is conducted by those who have had little direct involvement in day-to-day teaching. These teachers hold a contrary view about the level of impact of research that has been conducted by teachers. In affirming the value of this approach the teachers identify that the teacher-researcher has most impact in contributing to effective teaching when:

The research topic is based on direct evidence of pupil-need (rather than a ‘hunch’)

I must say that I have direct experience here [of classroom-based research]. It is most potent…effective…when a teacher actually sees something happening and sets out to find out more. (Tania)

The research is collaborative (i.e. with other colleagues)I think that more success would happen if there were teams…you know… groups…of teachers doing the research in a school. (Dee)

The teacher has a defined allocation of time to conduct the activityIt’s hard to find the time [to do research in the classroom]. If it is to be a serious part of teaching then time has to be set aside for a teacher to do it. (Robert)

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The research is fully supported by members of a SMT (Senior Management Team)

The only viable position is that a teacher [doing research] gets full support from senior management…that makes the research have clout. (Mo)

There is, in these data, a higher proportion of individual teacher-comments which indicates support for research findings when they are the product of individual teachers, or groups of teachers, than are apparent for the intrinsic value of ‘educational research’ per se. But in affirming the status of research findings generated from within the profession, this group also believed that certain underpinning conditions need to prevail in order to ensure the research activity has meaning in the practical domain of teaching.

Views regarding how to begin as a teacher-researcherThese teachers felt that ‘beginning’ research when in a teaching post was, on an individual basis, a decision-point governed by ad-hocracy. Some factors appeared to be common in many accounts of the ‘research biographies’ assembled from the transcripts; these included:

Being inspired by someone/something during an ITT (initial teacher training) course

We all remember, from college days, the lecturer who was able to draw stuff out of a hat. You did feel that the information you got was worth it, and I know I wanted to be able to prove what I do is correct by saying that it had been proven by research. (Violet)

Being ‘triggered’ by a particular child or group of childrenI think the most important thing is wanting to find out more about the pupils themselves…what makes them tick. (Tania)

Reading an article on a specific educational topicI remember reading an article on reading failure and it really made me sit up and think…is this what goes on with my kids…should I find out about it? (Gill)

Being involved in a CPD courseDoing my MA opened my eyes…there’s lots of other views…lots of information…finding out what’s right and wrong is important, so…I suppose…you have to do research into it. (Violet)

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Talking to another teacher or teachersI think that the best way to begin a [research] project is to ask around…talk to other teachers…go beyond your own beliefs… (Charlie)

Belonging to a network or ‘family’ of schoolsWe have got a really good subject network in this LEA…there are tons and tons of ideas for doing a research project [and]…I think we’ll get our act together next year. (Elaine)

Views regarding the potential for research conducted by teachersThese teachers felt that the teacher-researcher approach had significant potential. Underlying this view was a commonly held belief that:

teachers have been there and done it and [so]…they are in a better position to direct a focus of enquiry. Their hunch is built on professional instinct rather than a dispassionate survey of what’s been done already (Simon).

This is especially the case if situations could be developed whereby:

The research is embedded with SDPs (School Development Plans)Anything you decide to investigate has to be part of policy…or at least help to support it…in the long run. (Mo)

The research is part of an ongoing professional development awardI think that, because of lots of other demands, teachers need the discipline of having a framework…like a course…somebody pushing them…otherwise you just don’t do it. (Nathan)

Researchers from universities (and other bodies) could work in the classroom alongside the teacher

I don’t think we should set ourselves apart as teachers. We ought to be strong enough to invite others into our classroom to help us with research. (Pauline)

Appropriate recognition (in status and salary) is afforded to teachers engaged in researchGovernment should realise that extra effort needs to be rewarded. I suppose…it’s like the nurses…I do it [teaching] because I love it…but I want some other recognition than somebody say ‘That sounds interesting.’ (Charlie)

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CONCLUSION

The study reported in this chapter is by way of a pilot venture. It was designed as a means by which the views of teachers could be assessed regarding what is becoming one of the key strands in the professionalisation and status-enhancement of teachers.

It suggests that educational research demands focus, partnership and wide approval if it is to become embedded within the culture of teaching. Moreover, these data show evidence of the continuing tension, within the profession of teaching, between the ‘emotional’, instinctive work of teachers and the conservatism which frequently underpins and caricatures their beliefs and ways of working (Hargreaves, A. 1998). The teacher-as-researcher activity must contribute towards narrowing this gap. Meanwhile, what is most certainly clear is that collaboration rather than conflict, between teacher-as-researcher and those for whom ‘research’ is viewed as the principal domain, must be the key developmental theme. For, as Cochran-Smith and Lytle (1998) observe:

…most attempts to draw [such] a distinction [between practitioner and academic research] look very much like attempts by those working within the dominant epistemologies and methodologies to marginalise the ‘newcomer’ by defining it into an inferior status. (p. 107)

REFERENCES

Beveridge, S (1996) Teachers Researching the Curriculum. In B Carpenter, R Ashdown and K Bovair (eds) Enabling Access London: David Fulton Publishers

Clough, P and Barton, L (eds) (1995) Making Difficulties: Research and the construction of SEN London: Paul Chapman

Clough, P and Barton, L (eds) (1998) Articulating with Difficulty London: Paul Chapman

Cochran-Smyth, M and Lytle, S (1998) Teacher Research: the question that persists International Journal of Leadership in Education, 1, 19-36

Elliott, J (1990) Educational research in crisis: performance indicators and the decline of excellence British Educational Research Journal, 16, 3-18

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Everton, T, Galton, M & Pell, T (2000) Teachers’ Perspectives on Educational Research: knowledge and context Journal of Education for Teaching 26 (2), 167-182

Furlong, J, Barton, L, Miles, S, Whiting, C and Whitty, G (2000) Teacher Education in Transition Buckingham: Open University Press

Gray, J (1993) Frameworks and Priorities for Research in Education: Towards a strategy for the ESRC Swindon: ESRC

Guba, E (1990) The Paradigm Dialog London: SageHammersley, M (1997) Educational Research and Teaching: a

response to David Hargreaves’ TTA lecture British Educational Research Journal, 23 (2), 141-161

Hargreaves, A (1998) The emotional politics of teaching and teacher development: implications for leadership International Journal of Leadership in Education, 1, 315-336

Hargreaves, D (1979) A phenomenological approach to classroom decision-making. In J Eggleston (ed) Teacher Decision Making in the Classroom London: Routledge and Kegan Paul

Hargreaves, D (1990) Another radical approach to the reform of initial teacher training Westminster Studies in Education, 13, 5-11

Higher Education Funding Council /NFER (1998) Mapping educational research in England Bristol: HEFCE

Hillage, J, Pearson, R, Anderson, A and Tamkin, P (1998) Excellence in Research on Schools Sudbury: DfEE

McIntyre, D (1997) The Profession of Educational Research British Educational Research Journal, 23 (2), 127-140

Nisbet, J and Broadfoot, P (1980) The Impact of Research on Policy and Practice in Education Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press

Ranson, S (1995) The Future of Educational Research: Learning at the Centre Swindon: ESRC

Tooley, J and Darby, D (1998) Education Research: An Ofsted Critique London: Ofsted

Vulliamy, G and Webb, R (eds) (1993) Teacher Research and Special Educational Needs London: David Fulton Publishers

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Chapter 2

Same story, different accent : A trans-Atlantic view of partnership

Chris Blake

INTRODUCTION: THE DISAPPEARANCE OF A PROFESSION?

On one level, organic professional growth in American education has become institutionalised through numerous dot.org associations, which are in the business of hosting vast national conferences and regional workshops. A cursory examination of the issues on these conference agendas shows just how bound teacher education and professional development has become to the twin motifs of modernity and partnership. This is ironic, since the vision and nature of these motifs is being foisted upon, rather than derived from, the teaching profession, and this chapter will in part seek to establish that assertion. Within that ‘foisted’ discourse is the claim, almost mystically accepted at times, that partnership between the academy and the public school is the foundation of all teacher development. Part of a broad renewal agenda of the 1990s (National Commission, 1996; Darling-Hammond, 1998) teacher training at all levels has become intrinsically connected to this idea of partnership, but in a way that transforms it into an embodiment of a system of accounting for a narrow form of performance and assessment data.

This context was made the more personal for me after returning from one of those ubiquitous dot.org conferences recently. when a few lines of satirical comment appeared in my email inbox from a teacher education friend from a large state institution across the country in Oregon. His email offered a witty explanation on the current teacher shortage crisis in the USA. The message noted that in a democracy politicians are generally held accountable for their decisions, and this encourages them to have similar expectations about society’s constituent groups. This drive toward mutual accountability leads to a belief in the need for measurement, which in turn compels us to think up measurable objectives. From there it is a short step to target setting for different groups in the public eye, at which point experimentation,

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creativity and enjoyment are necessarily abandoned. Hence the contemporary crisis in teacher recruitment.

Behind this tongue-in-cheek scepticism there is a trenchant insight into a current major tension of American education, and its stress on professional partnership as the basis for teacher education. For whilst partnership is now a deeply embedded element of practice in the USA, there are disparities and divergences between the stakeholders in education which partnership has failed to address and which threaten to derail teacher recruitment and teacher education. This reality bears some resemblance to affairs in the UK, but the voice of accountability and its impact on teacher education will show a distinctive American accent at this juncture. And, just perhaps, the email satire may have hit the nail on the head, at least in part, as to why teaching seems to be having some big problems in recruiting new graduates to its ranks.

In what follows I focus extensively on events in my home state, Maryland, and use these as a case study of one dominant approach to developing partnership in teacher education, not least since Maryland has set out a model which is being readily copied across the county. In this way, the problems and possibilities that exist for partnership in Maryland are illustrative of a broader reform agenda across the United States. It should be stressed up front that partnership as an abstract concept is consonant both with the majority of learning theories of the twentieth century and the pragmatic realisation of resource distribution in teacher training. It is, in short, an attractive and valuable idea, and few would contend the logic of higher education and public K-121

education getting their acts together in the supply and education of new or veteran teachers. But what has not emerged, I will argue, is a cultural discussion on how partnerships might most usefully develop and what different kinds of partnerships could practicably exist. For whilst there is no absolute model of that most common societal partnership, marriage, so there should be plurality of partnerships in the teacher education realm. The dominant reform discourse, though, has either overlooked that fact or, more disturbingly, has ensured that such plurality is intentionally restricted. Those are value judgements that I openly assert as the basis and introduction to this chapter, and which provide the rhetorical context as we move from here on into the evidence itself.

1 K-12 refers to the grades at school and (roughly) signifies students of 5-18 years of age

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STATE-ISM AND THE APPARATUS OF EDUCATIONAL CONTROL

The notion of conformity is intrinsic to how partnerships have been established by State and local controlling agencies of education and this notion has given impetus, form and content to a new obligatory institution of the last decade, the Professional Development School or PDS. This was the explicit intention of the Maryland Higher Education Commission’s mandated ‘Redesign’ (1995), which required every teacher candidate to do an extensive internship in a specially designed Professional Development School (p.2). Lifelong learning was also central to teacher education in Redesign thinking, demanding that school-university partnerships must address the initial preparation and continuing education needs of teaching interns, beginning teachers, and experienced educators at various stages of their careers (p.11). But if the institutions were to co-operate, this also required new roles for faculty and teachers, so that higher education faculties were now expected to participate in school life, to contribute to school improvement action plans, to provide on-site seminars and to becoming truly school-centred in their work. In short, to take the practical dimensions and experiences of teacher training very much into their own academic world view. This, of course, resembles much of the similar 1990s school-based training drive in Britain. That drive saw the explosion of collaborative programs and re-distributed cost centres following the famous Circular 9/92 from the Department of Education. But whilst that event marked a shift in the ideological battle between Left and Right in Britain and a struggle of control between state and profession, a different kind of battle has ensued in the USA. For in the States the contest has fundamentally revolved not between profession and agency, but rather between different modes of agency in the delivery of teacher education, in which the professional dimension has simply been removed from the equation. The end result of partnership may be similar in Britain and the States, but the route getting there has been different. For whilst control of the reform agenda has been lost to the profession in England and Wales, the case can be made that it has simply never been made available to the profession here in the States. A closer analysis first of the Maryland Redesign agenda, and then the emerging Charter School alternative programs, is necessary here to establish this argument.

The view of partnership that dominates the state and regional scene can be described as comprehensive. By this is meant a

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totalizing school reform agenda built upon the interlocking components of K-12 curriculum reform and professional preparation and development reform. Key to this school component is the decade old Maryland School Performance Program, which connects student performance standards with school accountability, and then rank orders the school districts in terms of specific performance fields. This testing and reporting of performance at Grades 3, 5, and 8 in the fields of reading, writing, language usage, mathematics and social studies is overtly designed as a mechanism of school accountability. The noteworthy feature of this is that individual student performance is unreported, but rather aggregated into a school figure that allows comparison. Intriguingly, and unlike similar league tables in the UK, the data is not utilised as part of a political discourse on school choice, at least at this stage. The results are certainly publicised, but more for the benefit of informing state responses and interventions in school management (the State has recently taken over the running of three poorly performing Baltimore city schools) than for informing parent-consumer choice. Unlike the British model, the notion of purchasing power and the market levers of choice and selection by the parent-consumer run anathema to this particular bureaucratic model of reform, though as we shall see later a market model is beginning to emerge as a counter-model in recent American initiatives.

The significance of this state controlled agenda for teacher training is fundamental. If this is the curricular context to school performance and accountability, then professional training and development is clearly built upon the premise that for all students to achieve, teachers must be well prepared to teach their content fields, and their continuing development must be aimed at student achievement. And, moreover, the eye of the state is trained upon the teacher’s compliance and success in achieving these externally mandated goals. Thus the 1990s saw the incremental involvement of state jurisdiction in teacher training at both pre-service and in-service levels. The State Superintendent of Schools now has State authority for K-12 public education, teacher education certification, and the review and approval of teacher education preparation programs, as well as approval of continuing professional development experiences for state credit.

This shift over the past decade has radically altered the perception of curriculum and assessment in Maryland schools, and with it the kind of teacher partnerships and preparations that are necessary for its success. But Maryland was not prepared to simply re-craft professional development via school reform alone, but more

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structurally still determined in its Redesign of Teacher Education Agenda that new criteria for teacher education must be explicitly set out for universities and schools, and that the basis for these would be a new kind of accountable partnership. The roots of the Redesign date back to Investing in People: Maryland's Plan for Post-Secondary Education, completed in 1991. This report identified the improvement of teacher education as a key priority for Maryland, and set in motion a process that four years later, after extensive statewide collaboration among higher education and public school representatives, legislators, and community stakeholders, culminated in the issuance of the Maryland Higher Education Commission Task Force Report on Teacher Education. Known from the beginning as the Redesign of Teacher Education, this 1995 report institutionalised the defining qualities and criteria of teacher education reform in the region: partnered, top-down, structural, totalizing, accountable, funding-linked, standards-driven and performance-based.

Throughout the development of the Redesign and during its years of implementation, the Maryland State Department of Education partnered with the Maryland Higher Education Commission in an alliance of Maryland's two State education agencies, unprecedented in Maryland and uncommon in the nation. The Redesign continued the themes already underpinning school curriculum reform, thus securing both via school activities and accreditation licensing of teacher training institutions the same power of lockstep, partnered reform with which teachers had already become familiarised. The key components of the teacher education Redesign strategy fell into four distinctive areas, namely: strong academic background; extensive school-based preparation, especially in professional development schools; performance assessment; and linkage with K-12 standards and priorities. Since these are so crucial to understanding the function of partnership in the state, some brief elaboration on how some of these components interplay is warranted.

The specific element of the Redesign that relates to partnership reveals a raft of standards, interventions and constraints on how that partnership may be forged. At the core of this is the use of extensive field-based preparation in K-12 schools for teacher candidates, including an internship within two consecutive semesters that represent, at a minimum, 100 full days in a school. This arbitrary choice of 100 days has been uncritically received with little or no examination of why that should be the optimum time period in schools. Teacher candidates have these extensive internships in sites

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that are collaboratively planned with public school partners and that follow the Maryland Professional Development School Standards. These standards are derived from those of the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education, the largest and most influential accrediting body in the reform movement. Infused across four components of extensive internships, continuing professional development, performance assessment and student achievement, the standards set out in detail regulatory expectations and outcomes in the fields of learning, collaboration, accountability, organisation and structure, and equity. The mechanism for enforcing this totalizing model is the state itself, via the carrot of generous funding for new partnerships that exemplify this approach, and the stick of accreditation, performance review and ranking of teacher training institutions for those who do not live up to the mark. Either way, the state is the Panopticon, the all-surveilling eye and dictator of the process. The best illustration of this is the way in which assessment is the conduit for monitoring the whole process. The language of the Maryland Redesign document (1995: 5) sums this up directly and essentially:

Through the regular five-year state review cycle, the unit earns approval for its performance assessment system, which is based on the Maryland standards, the Essential Dimensions of Teaching, or the INTASC standards. Through this system, the unit provides ongoing and summative performance feedback to candidates and data for continuous improvement of programs.What this signifies is a tightly crafted and bound system of

symmetry between teacher education and teacher performance in the classroom. The model is complete, unified and absolute in its imperative and connects teacher preparation directly to the requirements placed on the K-12 system ‘priorities’. Moreover, layer upon layer of assessment data within the public school system provides both the curriculum experience and the monitoring mechanism for teacher candidates. In this system, programs prepare teacher candidates for assessment and accountability through numerous assessment programs: the Maryland Model for School Readiness [Early Childhood]; Maryland School Performance Assessment Program [MSPAP]; Maryland Core Learning Goals; Content Standards; High School Assessments; and Maryland Functional Tests. Finally the I.H.E. teacher education ‘unit’ uses feedback from state and NCATE review to show annual ongoing

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improvement through a mandated annual Teacher Preparation Improvement Plan (TPIP) and the NCATE report process.

This monolithic system represents the advance guard of systemic renewal across the country, in which partnership is a vehicle for teacher education reform. Responses from teacher practitioners to this trend will be held over to the concluding section of this chapter. For the time being, we can conclude this section with the clear recognition that this is a system in which the teacher is not the protagonist of reform, but the deliverer, or conduit of a reform agenda that represents the wishes of bureaucratic-legislative power in society, rather than the professional experience and voice. Another model of partnership, though, is also emerging in American education, and to this contrasting approach we now turn.

THE SOCIAL MARKET AND COMMUNITIES OF CHANGE

One of the most controversial and uncertain changes in school organisation in modern America is the emergence of the Charter School. This institution is intentionally built on more libertarian principles than those usually governing public education, and in the last three years the Charter School concept has found increasingly popularity especially in areas of poorly-performing schools, often urban. The ‘charter’, mainly granted for a period of 3-5 years, allows a school to establish a contract detailing mission, program, goals, performance criteria, student selection, and assessment of learning. Charters are issued by a sponsoring institution, ranging from the Federal government to state or local board to private organisation or charity. In this arrangement the school is accountable to the sponsor for fulfilling the charter, and in return the school is given increased autonomy and license in how it carries out its obligations. The accountability relationship, however, is not exclusive to the sponsoring group alone, since the school has to show in its goals both academic and fiscal responsibility to all funding parties (including taxpayers in the case of governmental-funded schools) and to parents of the selected students.

This melding of public-private roles and stakeholding is a distinctive quality of Charter Schools and clearly aligns the Charter School movement within the broader trends of the last twenty years to incorporate market ideas, such as public-private partnerships, school choice, selection and magnet schools within the educational realm. Common to these trends, advocates of Charter Schools cite several

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benefits which they see as resultant from the liberalisation of school organisation, funding and management. Key to these are increased success and accessibility to quality education (as opposed to the supposed ‘trapping’ mediocrity of conventional public schools), a climate of innovation and experimentation, and a new sense of teacher professionalism coupled to community involvement and partnerships.

But if the organisational and functional nature of Charter Schools offers a stark contrast with the state systemic reform agenda, another equally significant distinction lies in the rationale or basis for each kind of reform. Whilst the state reform is orchestrated from a deficit ideology and a yearning for higher and more excellent performance by students, the Charter School movement received its impetus from different agencies with different primary motivations. Charter Schools tend to be created by three distinct groups: grassroots organisations of parents, alienated by the educational and economic status quo, and looking for a new symbol of hope and growth in schools; by entrepreneurs, looking for new partnerships for the benefit of business opportunities; and by existing schools who wish to convert to charter status, either from disillusionment with the local bureaucracy or from anxiety about state intervention. It would be wrong, however, to see these groups in tension with each others, since part of the noteworthy early successes of Charter Schools has been their ability to unite divergent groups around specific agendas and goals. Thus it is common to discern defining qualities of Charter Schools which unite these divergent stakeholders and present the school with a clear sense of its identity and purpose, at least on surface level. Common signals of such unity are often the espousal of a particular, distinctive educational vision, which avoids the generalised and monolithic emphasis of the state-bureaucratic model above. Additionally Charter Schools are characterised by a readiness to embrace autonomy and unorthodox approaches to school management, and a clear interest in special populations. The latter characteristic is intriguing, contrasting clearly with the ‘education for all’ approach of the dominant reform agenda that Maryland and other states are so heavily invested in.

The exponential growth of the Charter School movement has placed it now, at the turn of the 21st century, at an intriguing stage of development. Still small enough not to rival seriously the bureaucratic agenda, it is yet to be proven whether it threatens the state hegemony of education. However, neither is the movement small enough that local bureaucracies can afford to ignore it, and for the first time Charter Schools featured in the Bush-Gore Presidential race. This is

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not surprising. At the start of the 1990s only one state, Minnesota, had passed legislation permitting the establishment of Charter Schools. By the mid-decade that number had risen to 19, and by the close of the 20th century 36 states, plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico had approved their existence. Noteworthy in its refusal to grant Charter School status rights to its citizens remains the State of Maryland, which considers itself the vanguard and protector of the state-controlling reform agenda at all costs. But that will not last for long. In the face of State takeovers of three of its ‘failing’ school, Baltimore City Public Schools in October 2000 released its New Schools initiative, petitioning the legislature to allow city residents to start new small schools or to run existing public schools. The operators of such schools would have increased authority in school governance, staffing, budget, and curriculum, in exchange for greater accountability. In short, they would look a lot like Charter Schools, and it will be interesting to see if the State legislature takes the bait.

Additional, top-down pressure of a financial nature may also persuade the remaining reluctant states to re-assess their hegemonic control of school growth and partnership. For the Federal Government itself, always an evolutionary rather than revolutionary force in American education, has incrementally put its bucks behind its mouth in this case. From a paltry $6 million in 1995, the U.S. Department of Education handed out $100 million in fiscal year 1999 (albeit, still a small drop in its overall budget), and the Bush Administration shows no sign of tightening the purse strings from hereon in.

How Charter Schools relate to the State-led system is fascinating, since the same language applies to both systems of provision, but in totally variant fashions. An illustration of this is the legal range of obligations that face any Charter School. States may choose varying degrees of responsibility and expectation, though common to the vast majority of such schools are policies relating to school governance, fiscal freedom, student selection and admission, instructional/ curricular requirements, staffing and labour law and accountability in terms of performance-assessment and contract renewal or revocation.

What does this mean for partnership in teacher education? Here is the 64 thousand-dollar question, since whilst the very notion of partnership is core to Charter Schools, the more narrow sense of this chapter’s focus on teacher education partnerships is an unknown quantity in terms of Charter Schools, yet. Despite the shortage of teachers in the USA, the primary route of training and licensing remains the State, via the usual route of a university accredited

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program, with mandated partnerships with PDS institutions. Monopoly training, would be a suitable epithet. Paradoxically, these partnerships between universities and PDS institutions are forged artificially and awkwardly between institutions that share very different cultural roots and identities. Certainly the partnerships that are forged can be effective, rewarding and successful, but they are organically odd, unnatural and ill-fitting. Charter Schools, meanwhile, are partnership creations at their core. They originate from natural, problem-solving communities, they depend on the sharing of visions, energies and resources, they address multi-group needs within a defined and distinct environment, and they depend on partnership between their stakeholders for their very survival. This strikes me as the kind of context very well suited for developing partnerships not only in the teaching of students, but also in the training and professional development of teachers.

This is why Charter Schools are radically challenging, not only to the status quo of the university-PDS relationship, but more significantly to the power-brokers behind and controlling that relationship, namely the State and its bureaucratic offices of education. The State may have to concede ground, ironically, since Charter Schools appear to be stepping into the breach just where the ratcheting of state policies and its monitoring systems seems to be doing little or no good: in urban, poor schools where often only badly trained or non-credentialed teachers are offering their teaching services. And finally, Charter Schools appeal to a unique American ethos, the willingness to use liberal capitalism in the service of the public good, in a way that the State eschews. Charter Schools have read wisely the American fondness for mixing private and public, for using entrepreneurship where convention fails, for taking a risk and using the hard-nosed business model when the usual approach seems to be lacking. This, like much of America, is paradoxical. For Charter Schools takes laissez-faire culture, blends it with that American love of the local community and its fiercely protected sense of identity, and offers up a cocktail that poses a direct challenge to the educational hegemony of the State. Would Charter Schools then offer a greater voice for teacher professionalism, a new liberalisation of the teacher as a real change-agent partner? That it is too early to say, but what we do know is that teachers have passionate reactions to their restricted roles within the State hegemony, and that those reactions may provide some clues for Charter Schools as how best to develop teacher professionalism within their radical, distinctive American

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environments. To that legitimacy, indeed imperative, of hearing the teacher voice in partnership, we turn now in a final concluding section.

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CONCLUSION: GIVING VOICE TO A SILENT PARTNER

I finish with two written comments from teacher colleagues of mine, working in Maryland and absolutely bound up with the reform agenda, in this case the MSPAP testing at grades 3,5 and 8 that Maryland is pioneering and modelling for the rest of the nation.

The MSPAPs are premised on the idea that a certain type of Instruction - co-operative, constructivist ‘learning by discovery’ – is superior. Given the cost of these tests, it's unfortunate that there's no data to show that kids who get the kind of instruction the MSDE so aggressively advocates do better. (David, 5th grade teacher)

What is revealing and troubling is not David’s scepticism about the MSPAP, but the pedagogy that is claimed to underpin it. For many professional voices have praised the constructivist pedagogy of recent years, but have watched it become hi-jacked and incorporated within an accountability system for which it was not conceived nor discovered. This utilisation by the State of the rhetoric and discourse of the profession is highly significant, showing how educational hegemony can express professional ideas, but in a fashion which stunts their realisation and implication. At least that is the conclusion one can reasonably deduce from David’s comment.

The second comment goes one stage further, showing how the outcomes of the MSPAP feature in an accountable ‘league table’ whereby districts are compared and pressured to ensure their improvement within the league table on an annual basis.

Third-grade MSPAP results haven't improved statewide in the last three or four years. (Tiny Kent County is a conspicuous exception, but its gains in the third grade somehow don't spill over into the fifth grade, which is still far short of the standard. We don't hear about these anomalies because the media only give the combined results). If I were a third-grade teacher, I'd be sick and tired of struggling toward a mirage. I'd focus on teaching my students the basics, like how to read and write, and giving them the fundamental, concrete knowledge they crave at this level instead of trying to teach economic theory to eight-year-olds. (Ann, 8th

grade teacher)Ann’s comments are a salutary reminder of the danger of ‘partnering-out’ education to too many constituents. Indeed, the notion that educational stakeholders should also uniformly control the process is a false and dangerous one. Whilst professional voice is not heard but is

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overwhelmed by an external discourse, then the risk remains of disenchantment. And without enchantment, there is little hope for teachers and students alike. This chapter has sought to show that the reform agenda has missed that point in its centralising effect of state control and an hegemonic apparatus, and that it is too early to judge yet whether the social market model offered by Charter Schools can provide a more organic, natural and flexible approach to creating educational partnerships. What is clear is that some kind of approach to achieving this is sorely necessary in contemporary American education.

REFERENCES: Darling-Hammond, L (1998) Teacher learning that supports student learning. Educational Leadership. 55(5) 6.Department for Education (1992) School-based Teacher Training - Circular 9/92 HMSO: UKNational Commission on Education (1996) What Matters Most: Teaching and America's Future US Department of EducationMaryland Higher Education Commission and Maryland State Department of Education (1995) The Redesign of Teacher Education in Maryland

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Chapter 3

Possibilities and impossibilities in school/ business/university partnerships: The cases of UK and South Africa

Dave Needham and Nicky Sanders

This chapter describes the first phase of a self-study (Loughran and Russell, 1997; Hamilton, 1998) into the development of a professional partnership between two academics living and working across the world (that is, across the landmasses of a large part of Europe and all of Africa): Dave in the United Kingdom and Nicky in South Africa. The research we report is focused on the processes of setting up a partnership between university academics for the purpose of enriching business education in schools in both countries. Together we have been grappling with the question: to what extent can one active learning technique, case analysis, as well as the processes of developing and writing the cases studies for one environment (the UK), can be used to help students within a very different, contrasting environment (South Africa)? Behind this research is our concern that the increasing emphasis upon the use of education and knowledge as a basis for competition could further disadvantage not just the performance of developing countries but also the opportunities that individuals within such countries have to become autonomous life-long learners. We write in the first person, with third person reference to one another’s names where clarity is needed. The African continent is the least of the things that separate us, as it can be bridged by real-time technologies: from phones and fax to electronic mail. In this self-study we tell the story of our growing partnership, exploring the differences in our contexts and the implications this has on our outlooks. We also attempt to analyse our partnership indicating its benefits and the issues it raises, not only for us personally and professionally, but also and especially for the schools and students we work with. In the process, we reflect on insights gained from other partnerships as well as our own and suggest some possible directions for the future.

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The term ‘global village’ is frequently used to describe the inter-connectedness of the world in which we live. At its simplest level, and assuming that you don’t have a temperamental server providing only limited Internet access, it is today possible for a UK academic (like Dave) to cross the world by both sending and receiving an e-mail from South Africa, before he finishes the cup of tea he is drinking. National boundaries are also easily crossed by diseases: consider HIV and BSE. Environmental impact, too, takes no notice of nation states. For example, the sulphur fumes of Drax and Ferrybridge and other major UK power stations have been identified as a major cause of acid rain in various parts of Scandinavia. Similarly, the booms and recessions of one group of countries have a direct impact upon the economic performance of another group of countries. This global village is not a static community. At times it is full of chaos and inequality, characterised on the one hand by negative images of hunger, famine, war and despair, or on the other by kindness, medical breakthroughs or simply optimism and hope for a better future. Global interconnectedness prompts many questions. For example: Why do some countries manage successfully to provide advanced medical care, while others cannot prevent basic disease? And why are some countries able to develop an education system with an abundance of resources providing opportunities for all to achieve their fullest potential, whereas others are only able to provide a frugal diet of education that simply pays lip service to the needs of the majority? As a metaphor with which to start this chapter, the notion of the global village is therefore a compelling one in both identifying and examining a range of questions and issues that may be understood better through academic partnerships between individuals and organisations that transcend national boundaries. Even with the best of intentions, it is not humanly possible to sustain prolonged contact with every human being we ‘connect’ with. Every year academics interact with hundreds of students and dozens of other academics in staff rooms and at conferences. Conferences provide a good opportunity to initiate and develop purposeful partnerships that are worth taking further. We met at the International Literacy and Education Research Network Conference in Melbourne, Australia. The themes of the Conference were: learning to communicate, tools for learning, lifelong learning and global learning. There was an emphasis on learning through the context of global cultural diversity. The Conference was itself a microcosm of the global village. The overarching rationale encouraged recognising our

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global connectedness, yet increasing local diversity. Dialogue that would lead to the kinds of collaboration required within an increasingly globalised world was encouraged. The organisers were committed to fostering collegiality and made opportunities for networking over teas, lunches and dinners. Casual conversations in groups led to increasingly focused discussions on topics of mutual interest. The end of the Conference brought this to an abrupt end, but the foundation had been laid with the recognition that something worthwhile was growing. The possibilities of our own professional partnership evolved gradually over the next few months, by means of long distance telephone calls, letters and, most significantly, e-mails.

The conference celebrated the international multi-literacies project, which is the paradigm Nicky has been working in. Nicky sees herself as a devoted conference networker thriving on the social flurry of tea breaks where intellectually stimulating conversation flies as fast as business cards. Dave prefers to remain in the background, sharing a glass of wine away from the madding crowd. He recounts how relieved he was when he was not selected to be a member of the panel discussions in the opening and closing plenaries. In contrast, Nicky relished the opportunities to speak for South Africa before such an international gathering. But both of us saw the conference as a chance to form links with others from usefully similar-but-different situations. Although we both work in higher education with business students, focusing on aspects of business education and business communication skills, it was clear from our first meeting that the marked differences between our teaching and research contexts as well as the phases of development of our respective countries could provide a useful base for the creation of a collaborative research and development project. Such a project would not only improve our understanding of issues, but could also be used to transfer knowledge and expertise about developing case studies for teaching, in a way that would provide positive and tangible outcomes for selected schools and colleges in South Africa. The initial phase has, therefore, been to improve our understanding of each other’s educational contexts, and then to use this as a basis for applying for research and development funds from sources that either target collaborative projects focused upon South Africa or sources that focus more broadly at partnerships aimed at public sector improvement within developing countries. It is clear to both of us that a thriving university–schools partnership would benefit from an international dimension. It is equally clear to us that setting up such school-based partnerships will be the final stage in a

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much longer project which must be set up with care and evaluated carefully at each stage. The first stage is setting up the initial international link.

From the outset it was hoped that the key benefit we would gain from working collaboratively would be the way our backgrounds and experiences as well as our contexts complemented each other. For example, although we are both teachers in higher education, on the one hand we have one party (Dave) experienced in linking sponsors with a scheme for the development of resources for classrooms in the UK. On the other hand, we have a context that desperately needs sponsorship, with a South African higher education teacher (Nicky) seeking to ‘make a difference’ in her country by using action research as part of a process of resource-based co-operative learning. The motivating question has been whether ‘synergy’ (the modern buzz word frequently used where two or more diverse activities or processes complement each other, with their combined effect greater than the sum of the parts: 1 + 1 > 2) could be applied through partnership to the activities of business education and business communication skills in our two countries.

THE KNOWLEDGE-BASED ECONOMY & COMPETITIVENESS

One of the features of studies that have looked at the development of countries is a focus upon whether they are ‘developed’ (and getting richer) or whether they remain underdeveloped (and are getting poorer). That is, if they are ‘developed’ they are becoming richer, are more self-sufficient, have less poverty and create more opportunities for individuals alongside a rising standard of living. Countries that are ‘underdeveloped’ have unequal trading relationships that benefit organisations from the richer countries. It is frequently argued that in many instances trade actively sustains unequal relationships. It is also argued that education and the transfer of knowledge helps to reduce the conflicting processes of development and underdevelopment. In this section we focus on this claim about the uses of education.

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Almost all studies show that education raises incomes and helps to improve the quality of life. And almost every country in the world endorses the value of education (Bradshaw and Wallace,1996). Education is thus viewed as a key vehicle for economic growth, as well as a major force for social change, modernisation and socio-economic transformation. The World Bank’s 1998 World Development Report took knowledge as its theme:

For countries in the vanguard of the world economy, the balance between knowledge and resources has shifted so far towards the former that knowledge has become perhaps the most important factor determining the standard of living…Today’s most technologically advanced economies are truly knowledge-based.

In recent years the UK government has placed considerable emphasis upon the role that it and businesses need to play in improving the UK’s competitiveness. In doing so, they claim that because other markets ‘are becoming progressively more sophisticated and well educated’, with a commensurate demand for innovative and higher quality products and services, that ‘knowledge, skills and creativity are needed to give the UK a competitive edge.’ In fact they even argue that pressure from low-cost economies (i.e. in the ‘underdeveloped’ countries) are one factor in causing a need for change (UK, 1998).

However this focus on education as a driver for growth and competitiveness ignores how improving the competitiveness of one country would either positively or negatively affect its other less developed trading partners or competitors. The UK government concerns about the pressure from low-cost economies implies that there is a need for change, even though such change might damage the internal development of some of these countries. It does not, however, discuss this sensitive issue. Within the UK the education system is heavily monitored and a key issue has been improving quality and the systems ability to meet the needs of the outside world (Fitz-Gibbon, 1996). There are claims that it is managing this. Within South Africa, although education is supported by a range of new policies embedded in research and good educational practice, it is hampered by massive disadvantage. The danger is that as the UK and similar education systems speed away ever-faster in the outside lane that the other systems are simply left stranded on the slip road, trying to gain enough speed that would allow them to join even the inside lane of the motorway2.

2 This metaphor relies on the conventions of British motorways which require fast-moving traffic to overtake in the outside lanes leaving the slowest moving

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THE FAST LANE AND THE SLIP ROAD

It was John Dewey at the beginning of the 20 th century who discussed the idea of an open learning environment linking schools and learning to the environment in which they exist (Isokangas and Tuomi, 1996). One solution has been to use case studies. Case studies have been widely used as a teaching and learning methodology in areas such as law and medicine for many years. Lawyers and physicians use the case method to identify precedents, and cases have been used to represent groups of similar events or symptoms. Future practice has been informed by past history and the case method has become so authoritative, that training within these professions has become heavily based on the case method. But in many different areas of learning such as business, science and technology, although teaching and learning is contained within a curriculum the outside context and events related to each area is constantly changing. This means that the inter-related and dynamic nature of this environment, in which organisations constantly adjust strategies to take account of changing events, means that case-studies need constantly up-dating. Thus the use of aging and traditional resources such as text books fails to bring education to life. Information within case studies in business textbooks is often second hand and adapted from articles in business magazines. Cases tend to be short, limited and re-purposed for educational use, with a subsequent loss of usefulness. Young people are more likely to transfer knowledge if they can link their learning to current issues that they can see are relevant and which they recognise as up-to-date. In particular, in the field of business, where the world is ever-changing, teachers look for up-to-date resources to reflect the events within the external business environment in order to complement lessons learned from quickly out-dated textbooks.

It is over this matter of case-studies in business education that our partnership has revealed stark differences in the two very different socio-economic learning contexts of our own countries. On the one hand, in the area of business education within the UK, case studies are sent to every secondary school and college free of charge. On the other hand, only the most privileged students and schools in South Africa have access to any case study material at all. Even they do not have the kinds of up-to-date resources that have been developed in the much richer UK context.

traffic in the inside lane.

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In the UK, case studies are developed from a range of partnerships between teachers, university academics, publishers and corporate sponsors. The most widely used of these, The Times 100, comes from such a four-way partnership which was mediated by Dave. The mediation ensures that the materials closely focus not just upon the curriculum, but also upon developing good practice in active learning techniques in a way that improves achievement. In other words they aim to get as close as possible to the ‘perfect’ environment for a life-long learner in a competitive knowledge-based economy. Many organisations want to make a positive contribution to the education of young people. Over more than ten years, since 1989, Dave has been working with a commercial publisher within the UK as well as a range of business organisations in order to develop partnerships to provide resources for classroom use.

The first such set of resources based on case-study was called On Target. It was launched in 1990 with fourteen case studies. The resource was sent to every school and college within the UK. Each participating organisation paid to be included in the pack. It meant that for a relatively small fee and co-operation within the process, one or more details of an organisation’s business strategy or actions would be widely circulated to students. It was a low-cost way for them to become involved in education and it was hoped that the resource would bring up-to-date information into the classroom and encourage active learning using attractive and up-to-date materials that both students and teachers alike would value. At the heart of the process was the need to keep the project heavily educationally-focused and theoretically-based in order to show students that work within the classroom had relevance in the business world. It was hoped that the cases would provide vitally needed information, data and metaphors that would help to improve classroom practice and empower students to develop higher levels of response within assessments. In order to do this each case had to be both interesting and rigorous. The pack was perhaps best known for the case study which described the readjustment of the marketing mix of Smarties in the face of competition from M&Ms who entered the bite-sized sweet market in the UK during the 1980s. This case discussed a range of injections such as new promotions, improved targeting and segmentation and analysed the affect of a number of strategies such as the launch of the blue Smartie upon the product life-cycle of the brand.

This partnership ‘invented’ what was widely considered to be a new concept in the development of sponsored resources. Before

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writing each study the educator both talked and advised staff from each sponsoring organisation about curriculum needs and requirements, as well as about what would or would not make a good case study. The process of preparing case studies was eclectic and, more usually than not, involved using a range of methods. Data collection usually depended upon the sponsor of the study. Although some studies were written on the basis of personal interviews, others were developed after access had been gained to what had before been confidential data. Given the use of brand or organisational names within case studies and the fact that each organisation had its own ‘agenda’ or educational objectives, it was particularly important that each was strongly advised so that case studies would be ethically-based within the guidelines produced by the National Consumer Council within the UK. These are there to ensure that sponsors do not present overtly promotional materials to children under the guise of objective information. From the early stage it was particularly important that appropriate language was used so that each case was not viewed as an opportunity to tell another success story! Words that embellished brands or actions were replaced and theory and principles rather than products were placed at the heart of each study. And, of course, it was important to ensure that the educationalist rather than the sponsor would have the final word about the ethical nature of content.

Although as an innovative learning resource On Target was well received by teachers, it lasted for only one edition. In 1991 the external business environment within the UK was in recession, and this made it difficult to find sponsors to finance another edition. Another problem that emerged was that On Target did not have the drawing power or the name that would interest organisations in sponsoring part of a resource.

During 1994 Dave met with a number of senior managers from Times Newspapers. The focus of the conversation was upon how Times Newspapers could make a positive contribution to teaching and learning processes within the business classroom. After much discussion, it was agreed that The Times 100 brand could be developed and used to encourage sponsors to become involved in an ongoing educational initiative that would bring case material into the business classroom. The first edition of The Times 100 was launched in 1995. It comprised more than fifty sponsored case studies from both private sector organisations and government departments and since then new case studies have been written, sponsored and distributed

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annually at no cost to schools. Today The Times 100 has become a brand name that has been welcomed by teachers and supported by individuals and organisations in the public sector as a partnership through which private businesses can make a positive contribution to how young people learn in the classroom. In fact the 3rd edition was launched in 1998 by David Blunket, the Secretary of State for Education and Employment. The 4th edition was launched in 1999 by Steven Byers, the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry. A powerful resource had been developed in a continuing four-way partnership between university, businesses, schools and a corporate sponsor to improve the quality and relevance of learning in business classrooms across schools in the UK.

Nothing of the sort exists in South Africa. In stark contrast to this avenue for resource development, South Africa is still bearing the brunt of apartheid policies of separate development where, in spite of recent legislative change based upon sound educational research, the bureaucratic processes are unable to implement new educational policies and the majority of schools continue to suffer disadvantage. Their schools are also under-funded and suffer from a lack of resources. To quote the official source:

At the heart of the problem were inequities left over from the apartheid days. Three out of four black schools have no learning equipment or libraries. Classrooms are overcrowded; teachers under-qualified, often under-paid and unmotivated; textbooks scarce; teacher-pupil ratios unacceptably high. More than half the 27,000 schools in the country do not even have telephones. 1998 began with protest marches through city centres by pupils demanding such basics as writing materials and books. Political protests – such as sit-ins and stay-aways – occur too frequently at schools, say experts, implying an absence of a culture of learning. (Editors Inc, 1999: 130)

Historically advantaged educational institutions continue to use best practice, but this is not directly benefiting the broader population. Case studies of a sort are available in privileged schools and tertiary institutions, but the schools that would really benefit from good resources cannot afford them. There is still no co-ordinated partnership between corporate sponsorship and needy schools – in fact, one could argue that all schools are deserving. Even the national initiative of the South African Qualifications Authority (SAQA) is partially funded by the European Union. There is insufficient state budget to reach all sectors signifying an unprecedented need for

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partnerships that will directly benefit the masses of South African scholars. The intention of the partnership studied here is to do something about this situation

THE STATE OF PLAY

Setting up a partnership that reaches across borders was not easy. It also involves a steep learning curve. However, the benefits of our partnership far outweigh any problems. We have both had times when our servers or LANs have been down and our dependence on technology and e-mail have been frustrated. We have for instance, set several Wednesdays aside to work concurrently on joint projects, and then been thwarted by one of us being off-line for the better part of the day. Eventually Dave will send an SMS (Short Message Service) from his PC using the Vodakom Cell phone service provider website to send it to Nicky’s cell phone. This in turn depends on Dave’s internet working and Nicky’s cell phone being on. If possible, Nicky will put a quick telephone call through (very expensive) and clear up any misunderstanding, but the opportunity of working together is nevertheless thwarted. We also had virus contagion early on, but technicians, virus alerts and patches on PCs later, we have had several virus-free months now.

A minor constraint in our partnership is working on different time zones (one to two hours, depending on summer daylight saving time), but in our technologically global community the e-mail is still immediate and no respecter of zones or climates. A more significant time-related constraint is when we both have other pressing deadlines, commitments and committees to distract us, not to mention academic jobs in which we both have open-door policies for our students to approach us for help on a range of issues. In spite of this, even if there is only time to rush off a few lines to keep the communication open, we are developing a mutual understanding of ‘where we’re coming from’, our respective constraints and frustrations. This is where e-mail is again a great advantage: not only do we have a record of our dialogue to revisit if we want to develop a meta-critique of our interaction, it is also quick and efficient (when it works!).

In the early phases of the partnership it was important to think about how it could be used as well as the benefits that could accrue. We discussed a range of key concepts including the setting up of learning partnerships, issues of disadvantage and literacy (forms and illiteracy rates), various learning issues, as well as research into the

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effectiveness of learning through the use of case-study, an area with which Dave has been associated. It was necessary to consider the gaps between developed and developing countries as well as between a knowledge-based economy such as that of the UK and high levels of illiteracy, especially computer illiteracy, among Black South Africans. Illiterate people tend to be discriminated against with the assumption that they are ignorant, when it is a failure to communicate ideas adequately because of illiteracy that is the problem. But anyway how could a knowledge-based economy emerge out of high levels of illiteracy? There were many issues. For example, could case-studies open up opportunities for life-long learning? Would they help to bridge such gaps in learning by enabling students to understand about the workplace and would this reduce some of the problems encountered in getting learning placements? However, although the gaps between theory and practice may be to some extent bridgeable by case-study, there is over-riding factor militating against their use. South Africa is under-resourced so there are few published case-studies of any relevance (There are a few: those of multinational companies like Coca-Cola and Nestlé in The Times 100). Already however, there is a recognition of a real need. The Business School of The University of the Witwatersrand, Gauteng has generated corporate funding to produce a weekly television documentary called ‘Boardroom Dancing’ in which case-studies are scripted to illustrate business practices.

It is clear that more resources are needed from outside bodies. Thus part of the partnership has been taken up with looking for funding. For instance at the time of writing we have made a development funding submission to The British Council. Doing this has proved to have a useful side-effect. Having a task to undertake (especially to deadline!) is a useful way of producing focus. Whether this initial proposal is funded or not will not damage the strength of the partnership. Simply applying to a potential source of research money is a useful exercise, and one from which we have learnt. This is a steep learning curve for both of us and not a purposeless exercise if we do not get the funding.

BENEFITS FROM PARTNERSHIP

Some benefits are long-term. In the case of this partnership the long term hope is that more academics and others will link up in partnerships particularly to the benefit of the developing country (in

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this case, South Africa). This would be synergy, indeed. There is some evidence that synergies tend to show themselves at advanced stages of partnerships (Ellis and Moon 1998: 395) where parties come to see themselves as parts of a larger entity creating joint value together. We speculate that such parties might need to be our respective institutions and also the institutions of other partners.

However other benefits are immediately obvious. Partnerships support a Vygotskian approach in which ‘cognition is socially shared’ (Vygotsky, 1978) or more currently, adopting a multi-literacies approach in which meaning is socially constructed (Cope and Kalantzis, 1999, Gee et al, 1996). Similarly, novellist EM Forster wrote, ‘How do I know what I think until I see what I say?’ Or as Rebecca West said, ‘I really write to find out what I know about something and what is to be known about something.’ This is evidenced in our increasingly articulate e-mails. In e-mailing one another, we come to realise the value of shared thoughts, and our replies, often inserted intertextually in upper case to distinguish the reply from the original, develop the conversation in a verbally sophisticated manner. In using e-mail and writing our thoughts to each other we are able to find out so much more than before. The contention is raised ‘that learning should occur through assistance and not through assessment’ (Samaras and Gismondi in Beckers and Simons, 1999: 6). The level of learning achieved in our one-to-one correspondence has been exponential and challenging, with responses to arguments serving to assist learning breakthroughs far more than we expected.

Through working together, motivation and performance are enhanced, in that our interaction becomes mutually persuasive:

Social persuasion can contribute to successful performances to the extent that a persuasive boost leads a person to attempt new strategies or to try hard enough to succeed. (Tschannen-Moran et al in Beckers and Simons, 1999: 6).

To put it another way, academic progress is enhanced by a dynamic partnership. There have been times when one of us has suffered a slump in motivation and through sharing this we have been encouraged to sustain a higher level of productivity.

Focusing our ideas upon the notion of a partnership also had the effect of engaging in an intellectually stimulating dialogue between parties who share values and ideals. From Nicky’s viewpoint, the possibility of transcending national borders and a heritage of suppression and self-censorship through engaging in dialogue with

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someone who has never known repression, particularly intellectual (i.e. ‘Thought Police’, Special Branch, Big Brother’s watching you, with helicopters circling the university campus and swooping low at any suspicion of an ‘illegal gathering’ in the mid-eighties) was liberating. Nicky is also sustained by the feeling that there are good people out there, who care a lot about their fellow people, even though they do not have a clue about the extent of human suffering that is encountered daily in South Africa. And although they cannot relate to the floating hostility of living in a place where human life is worth no more than the cell phone the victim is carrying, working upon this sort of project shows that others are able to overcome the initial bliss of ignorance and make a concerted effort to reach out and provide support for people in a different context.

It is also our belief that technology is helping our partnership to happen. There is a reassurance that there is a virtual conversation at any available moment - whether to give vent to pent-up frustrations over trivial (usually bureaucratic) blundering or technologies letting one down; or to simply celebrate a joyous moment, some happy feedback from a student or completing a batch of tedious marking. We could explore the implications of using e-mail to develop a conversation: on the one hand, once the ‘Send’ icon has been clicked the words become something permanently on record, printable and file-able, but as they are sent out with spelling errors (typos) as results of dyslexic flying finger-tips on the keyboard, they are merely an extension of our thoughts, a moment of thinking something, expressed at a given moment, possibly even read in the next moment, but nevertheless, now cast in black and white print until the server caches them or the hard copy gets lost.

Finally, and not least, one of the driving forces for creating a partnership is that no matter how small the first step is, it will lead to change, either through the ripple-effect or a knock-on effect; either way the initial influence will grow. This is especially so in our area of work, where we are training teachers or commerce students who will in turn have significant circles of influence in their own way. Dave’s students will move on to become teachers and exert sustained influence on their students in turn. Nicky’s students will continue through their studies to find jobs or become entrepreneurs (in a society desperate for jobs) and shape the economy of the country. So we are sustained by the knowledge that the partnership is already worthwhile and valuable beyond its direct personal value to ourselves and our plans.

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IN CONCLUSION

At this stage when writing this chapter, the partnership is its infancy. It was through meeting at a conference that recognition of shared interests led us to create a research partnership. We hope the project will move forward and attract funds and interest that will turn heads and lead to the development of up-to-date case studies that can be used within South Africa classrooms. The funding application to The British Council is the first stage in the process, and as we continue to discuss our ideas for the project, we are aware that we will have to become creative as we move forward. The hope is that at whatever scale the project evolves we eventually find a way to enrich the classroom experiences of many young people in South Africa in a way that helps them to improve their skills, knowledge and understanding that are essential for their long-term employability. And, in doing so we must not be put off by the hurdles. If it is true that ‘Successful partnerships rarely just happen - they have to be designed’ (Roundthwaite & Shell, 1995: 54) then ours is a rare thing that has evolved into something worth structuring in a more deliberate way.

REFERENCES:

Atweh, B, Kemmis, S and Weeks, P (1998) Action Research in Education: Partnerships for Social Justice in Education London: Routledge

Beckers, J and Simons, G (1999) Research Partnerships in Education: Establishing a research/training partnership to facilitate the professional integration of novice teachers and help them become ‘reflective practioners www.leeds.ac.uk/educol

Bradshaw, YW and Wallace M (1996), Global Inequalities, London: Pine Forge.

Cyert, RM and Goodman, PS (1997) Creating Effective University-Industry Alliances: An Organizational Learning Perspective Organizational Dynamics 25(4) 47-57

Desforges, C and Lings P (1998) Teaching knowledge application: advances in theoretical conceptions and their professional implications British Journal of Educational Studies 46(4) 386-398

Editors Inc (1999), South Africa 98-99: South Africa at a Glance

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Ellis, N and Moon S (1998) Business and HE links: the search for meaningful relationships in the placement marketplace – part two Education + Training 40(9) 390-397

Fitz-Gibbon, C (1996) Monitoring Education: Indicators, Quality and Effectiveness, Cassell

Gee, JP, Hull, G Lankshear C (1996) The New Work Order: Behind the Language of the New Capitalism, Boulder: Westview

Ginsberg, A (1998) South Africa’s Future: From Crisis to Prosperity, Pan MacMillan.

Hamilton, ML (ed) (1998) Reconceptualizing Teaching Practice: Self-study in Teacher Education, London: Falmer

Hyland, T and Matlay H (1998) Lifelong learning and the ‘New Deal’ Vocationalism: Vocational training, qualifications and the small business sector British Journal of Educational Studies 46(4) 399-414

Isokangas, J and Tuomi L (1996), Partnership Based Business Simulation – Practice Enterprises in Finnish Business Education, Economic Awareness 8(3) 21-27

Kalantzis, M and Cope, B. (1999) Multiliteracies: Rethinking What We Mean by Literacy and What We Teach as Literacy in the Context of Global Cultural Diversity and New Communications Technologies. In Global Literacy Visions Revisions and Vistas in Education, Serdang: Universiti Putra Malaysia Press: 1-12

Loughran, J and Russell, T (eds) (1997) Teaching about Teaching London: Falmer

Luby, A (1996) Staff Development and innovative teaching: a case study Innovation and Learning in Education: The International Journal for the Reflective Practitioner 2(2) 26-34

Needham, D (2000), A Case Study of Case Studies: Producing Real World Learning within the Business Classroom, 7th International Literacy and Education Research Network Conference in Melbourne

Roundthwaite, T, and Shell, I, (1995) Techniques: Designing Quality Partnerships, The TQM Magazine 7(1) 54-58.

Taylor, I (1997) Developing Learning in Professional Education: Partnerships for Practice Buckingham: The Society for Research into Higher Education & Open University Press

UK Department for Education and Employment (1998) Our Competitive Future - Building the Knowledge Driven Economy (Cm 4176) London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office

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Vygotsky, LS (1978) Mind and Society: The Development of Higher Mental Processes. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press

Wolfenden, R (1995) Experiences of Enterprise in Higher Education within two research-led universities Education and Training 37(9) 15-19.

World Bank Development Report (1998) Knowledge and Information for Development New York, Oxford Press.

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PART TWO:

PROCESSES IN PARTNERSHIPS

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Chapter 4

The myth of the well-planned project or How research is like life: It doesn't always turn out the way you expected

Julie Ann Kniskern

INTRODUCTION

In this chapter I try to unpick some of the results of a research project at Brandon University in the province of Manitoba. The research study was based on a development project devised to create a collaboration between schools and universities using the field experience of student teachers to help with the staff development of experienced teachers. A rural Superintendent of Schools asked the Director of Field Experience at the university to develop a project to assist experienced teachers in implementing a new Early Years English Language Arts (EY-ELA) curriculum. The teachers were to be paired with student teachers who had excellent knowledge of the new ELA documents. The purpose of this pairing was to implement the new Manitoba EY-ELA curriculum through field experience. The Superintendent hoped that the student teachers would ‘teach’ the new curriculum to the experienced teachers and that the experienced teachers would ‘teach’ classroom management and their general knowledge of teaching to the student teachers. Both the students and the co-operating teachers were to keep journals of their learning experiences.

The purpose of my research study was to investigate the efficacy of a collaboration between a rural school division and the University in an integrated model of field experience and staff development. Four ‘second year after degree’ Early Years education students and five experienced, co-operating teachers were selected to participate in the project. It was hoped that we would develop a model for future combined field experience and staff development courses focused on curriculum implementation for rural school divisions. I am exploring why this particular research project did not meet expectations, and what role I played in the process. It is therefore primarily a self-study of collaboration.

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In this chapter I try to deconstruct the events and activities of the project from its inception in April 1999 to its completion in April 2000. I had originally planned to compare the students' and teachers' understandings of the events and activities in implementing the EY-ELA curriculum through their reflective journals. I also wanted to look at the implementation through the Teaching and Learning Project Outcomes (see Appendix). However, because of events outlined in the body of this chapter, the research has instead come to focus on why the original proposal did not come to fruition.

The research is strongly rooted in reflection. The method of the original project relied on reflection by both student teachers and the teachers in the schools. Reflection is an important learning tool in professional education, though here it is also being used for research purposes. The method of self-study is reflective in the same paradigm as reflection in professional education. Many works are cited frequently in the literature from Dewey (1916) onwards. Particularly influential on my practice is Schon (1983, 1993). Schon’s model distinguishes two types of reflection: reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action. Both of these apply to my research in this project

Vygotsky's (1962, 1978) ‘zone of proximal development’ model applies to the learning of both children and adults. It fits with the philosophy of the Manitoba English Language Arts Curriculum Framework of Outcomes and Standards, which is that of the ‘gradual release of responsibility’. Vygotsky also focused on the social construction of learning using language as a powerful tool for scaffolding learning through the ‘zone of proximal development’. While this is something that underpins the specific curriculum development within the project, it also underpins my own development as a reflective researcher, as I try to understand my role in the project with the help of partners in the international research community as well as partners nearer to home.

THE PROJECT

In April of 1999 the Director of Field Experience received a request from a rural Superintendent of Schools to develop a project that would assist teachers in his school division in implementing the new provincial Early Years English Language Arts curriculum documents. After an initial meeting the project evolved into A Collaborative Integrated Field Experience Model for the Implementation of the New

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English Language Arts Curriculum Using Computer Technology in Rural Schools.

The outcome of this study was to be a model for student teacher, co-operating teacher and faculty collaboration for implementing curricula in rural school divisions using computer technology. The outcomes of the study as articulated by the superintendent and the teachers were:

1) to explore ELA instructional and assessment strategies and tools such as observation, using the Primary Language Record, Running Records, Miscue Analysis, Retelling;

2) to create and use integrated units using all six of the ELAs - listening, speaking, reading, writing, viewing and representing, as well as cross-curricular units;

3) to develop a model for future combined field experience and staff development courses focused on curriculum implementation for rural school divisions.

Data were to be collected from the following sources:1) daily reflective journals maintained by the student teachers;2) daily reflective journals maintained by the co-operating

teachers;3) observations collected during face-to-face inservices; 4) traditional field experience reports.

Analysis was to be based on the ‘bins’ of Miles and Huberman (1994) in which information was to be sorted according to theme. Four categories of ‘bins’ were to be used:

1) learnings between student teachers;2) learnings between students and co-operating teachers;3) learnings between faculty and student teachers; 4) learnings between faculty and co-operating teachers.

Analytic Questions:1) What factors in the project produce changes in implementation

of the EY-ELA curriculum by the students’ and co-operating teachers?

2) What is the nature of the communication between the student teachers, co-operating teachers, and researchers using electronic media?

Through the spring and summer months there were a number of meetings with the Superintendent and teacher leader assigned to the project. In June the student teachers had an opportunity to meet with

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their co-operating teachers and spend a half-day in the classroom where they would be teaching in the fall. At this time a Project Steering Committee was struck. It included two of the teachers, two student teachers, the teacher leader, the superintendent, the Director of Field Experience and myself as the EY-ELA professor. This committee, with input from the other teachers not on the Steering Committee, began to plan inservices for the fall term.

In August, just before the school year was to begin, another full day meeting was held with the students and teachers to finish planning the inservice sessions for the fall term. On August 30th the students and co-operating teachers began the school year, and they were to begin keeping reflective journals. At the end of two weeks each pair had a debriefing session on the start-up of the school year in each of the classrooms. Unfortunately, I was unable to attend this session and to take part in the discussion.

On September 13th the students were back on campus and participated with me in a special course in EY-ELA, focusing on the outcomes of the project (see Appendix). We met weekly for a minimum of two hours to:1) explore ELA instructional and assessment tools, such as

observation using the Primary Language Record, Running Records, Miscue Analysis, Retelling, to name a few;

2) understand and use viewing and representing strategies;3) create and use integrated thematic units using all six of the ELAs -

listening, speaking, reading, writing, viewing and representing; 4) discuss how numbers 1 to 3 will be accomplished through a

collaborative staff development course for both students and co-operating teachers.

It was intended that the co-operating teachers would do the course via distance education and continue to interact and correspond with the student teachers via e-mail, listserve and a chatline. It was also our intention to use listserve and a chatline for the students and teachers to continue to interact and discuss ELA strategies and tools for the classroom with the researchers.

JOURNALS

The reflective journals were to be a record of daily observations on the implementation of the ELA curriculum through various strategies and tools. They could be kept as a hard copy or as an electronic file. They were intended

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to enable the participants to consider how the strategies used led to new understandings, learnings and an appreciation of teaching, and

to enable both the beginning and experienced teachers to discover the practical knowledge of classroom learning and to articulate and assess their experiences.

The student teachers were very familiar with the use of reflective journals and were comfortable with the idea. They had been an integral part of the two EY-ELA courses that had taken with me the previous year.

The purpose of the journals is for you to record your responses to the books you read, the things we discuss in class and ideas from the assigned texts and journal articles. I want to know what you think about what you are learning. Although I will read and respond to your journal, your primary audience is yourself. You are writing to discover and reflect on what you are thinking as you engage with new, as well as familiar texts and ideas. The purpose of keeping a response journal is not a test in which you display correct answers, but rather a means of stimulating dialogue to explore thoughts and ideas and address the kinds of uncertainty that accompanies new learning. Engage in conversations with your peer-response group. This enables you to use language to learn and reflect upon, clarify, extend and broaden your thinking about the ideas inherent in curriculum development and implementation. One-half page per hour of class is the minimum required. Keep your responses in a folder. Write on notebook/loose leaf paper (leave a good margin for comments) and add new entries as you write them. Paginate and date each entry and clearly cite any text to which you are responding. This means including the author, illustrator, full title, publisher and date of publication. When your journal is completed, add a table of contents, which includes journal page number, title, author and date of entry. At the end of the course, you are to review the entries in your journal and reflect on and summarize your learning. Develop a rubric to assess your response journal. (Course outline, 02.474) Reflective journals were new to the experienced teachers. Even

though several of them had their students keep various types of journals or learning logs, they themselves did not journal or reflect on their teaching. One of the participants said that she had a life and she didn't have time to keep a journal. Needless to say, this comment surprised the student teachers as they saw journalling and reflection as

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a part of their daily routine. Their learning had been scaffolded throughout the courses that they had taken with me, so they saw writing and reflecting as an integral part of the teaching/learning cycle.

FIELD EXPERIENCE

The rural school division was about two hours drive from the university. It encompassed one large town and the surrounding area. The student teachers had been placed in different schools in the town, and one was placed in a rural setting, twenty kilometres outside of the town.

I travelled one hundred and sixty-five kilometres to supervise the students’ field experience. I made appointments to observe each student teacher; I observed them teaching and took notes throughout the lesson. After observing the students, I met with them to talk about their lessons. Together we reflected on the lesson - reflection-on-action - and then I wrote a report on the lesson. I gave one copy to the student teacher, a second copy to the co-operating teacher and the third and final copy to the Field Experience office. After completing the observation, conference, report process, I would then travel to the next school and repeat the procedure. This took about two days, allowing for a half-day for each student.

An additional half-day was spent on a variety of inservice sessions related to the new EY-ELA curriculum, for example: Portfolio Assessment and Goal Setting; Triad Conferencing; Planning Integrated Thematic Units. The student teachers and co-operating teachers together developed these inservice sessions.

It should be noted that the plans for electronic connections soon went by the wayside. Not all of the teachers had access to computers in their classrooms or at home. In one instance, the teacher's computer only worked when the teacher in the adjoining classroom had her computer turned on! Soon it was evident that our plan to share through e-mail, listserve, and chatlines, was not going to work. Also, once the students were back on campus, their energies were focused on their courses and not on the classrooms in which they had been student teaching. They did, however, write letters to the classes in which they had been teaching to keep in touch with the students.

The students knew that they were part of a special project and that they would be in the same classroom with the same teacher and students from August 1999 to April 2000, with times back on campus

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for their courses. When they came back on campus at the end of November after being in the schools for five weeks during October and November they indicated to me that they had felt that they had learned what they could from their co-operating teachers and did not want to go back.

When I questioned them, it appeared that the co-operating teachers were not using the new EY-ELA curriculum documents. The main goal of this project was to help the teachers to become more confident using the curriculum as modelled by the student teachers. My observation was that the student teachers were demonstrating excellent lessons using the five general outcomes, fifty-six specific outcomes and a variety of activating, acquiring and applying strategies from the curriculum. However, I did not know what was happening in the ‘regular’ part of the school day with the co-operating teachers. It was not my job to supervise them. They are professionals. They became a part of this project to improve their understanding and practice of the new EY-ELA so I had no reason to expect that they would not implement it.

ANALYSIS

When it was time to gather the first term responses (August through December) from the students and teachers, I discovered that the teachers, with the exception of the teacher leader, had not kept reflective journals. They said that my expectations were too high and that they did not have time to keep journals. They felt that since they were not taking a course from me, as were the student teachers, they did not have to complete the journal.

What was I to do? I had no power to compel them to complete the journals. Only the Superintendent could do that. Without the teachers' journals I would not be able to complete my research project. However, like a good researcher, I told myself that this was all part of the evidence that I was collecting. I needed to look at what had happened thus far in the project. I needed to analyse the events of the first five months of the project. If this was to be a model of future combined field experience and staff development courses for rural school divisions, then I needed to unpick what had happened.

Upon reflection I was able to come to some conclusions about what contributed to the demise of the project.

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Curriculum change cannot be imposed top-downThe Superintendent initiated the project because he wanted the teachers in his school division to implement the new provincial EY-ELA curriculum. He did not realise that the teachers did not have the same need or intention, even though they contributed to the development of the various inservice sessions on the EY-ELA curriculum. If the teachers were not committed to the learning, then it would not occur. The teachers were quite comfortable with their classroom practices and saw no need to change. They were not taking a course from me, so they did not have to reflect on their learning. Whereas the students were taking a class from me and had to reflect on their teaching and learning.

Communication was impairedThe technological communication system broke down early in September. There were no e-mails, listserves or chatlines for the student teachers and co-operating teachers to keep in touch with each other and continue the conversations about student learning that had begun in those first few weeks of school in August and September. Once the student teachers were back on campus I was able, through our weekly meeting for our course, to keep ‘in touch’ with their learning and growing understandings about teaching and learning. Although the students maintained contact with their co-operating teachers, it was primarily to stay in touch with the students in the classroom, not to discuss pedagogy.

Conflict in power relationshipsThere were significant power relationships that militated against on-going communication. Superintendents have power in the school division; I had no power in the school division. Although a Superintendent invited me to the school division to help the teachers implement the new EY-ELA curriculum, I was an outsider. I really could not have an impact on their classrooms if the teachers chose not to co-operate.

I was seen as someone who was creating some ‘cognitive dissonance’ about their current classroom practices. I was making them feel uncomfortable. Several of the teachers said that they had signed up for the project so they could get a student teacher for eight months.

The student teachers did not have any power in their co-operating teachers' classrooms. They were ‘guests’ and had to adapt to the

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culture of the classrooms. When they were on campus I was their professor and shared a common understanding of the EY-ELA curriculum. Then I was in a position of power. When I went into the classrooms to supervise their student teaching I was also in a powerful position to influence their future careers as I wrote their weekly reports, as well as their final field experience report, which could be used as a job reference.

REFLECTIONS

What would I do differently if I had to do this project again?First of all, I would make sure that the electronic media worked for

everyone. No one should be left out of the conversation. All classroom teachers should have access to technology to communicate with others at a distance.

Secondly, I would ask the Superintendent to select the teachers to participate in the project. I realise that this has political implications for Superintendents, but I feel it is necessary for teachers who participate in this kind of project to be learners and risk-takers. It is also important that the power structure be clearly delineated.

Thirdly, at the very beginning of the project, I would make clear that keeping a reflective journal is an essential aspect of the project. Participants unwilling to keep a journal should not be part of such a project.

I took the failure of this project very personally and for a long time I could not talk or write about it. Now that I have written about it I am able to see the factors that contributed to its failure. I am able to see the importance of scaffolding the learning of the co-operating teachers and not making assumptions about where they are in their learning and reflecting on their implementation of curricula. I learned a great deal about how the efficacy of collaboration between a university and a rural school division should be investigated.

REFERENCES

Manitoba Education and Training (1996) Manitoba Curriculum Framework of Outcomes and Grade 3 Standards, Kindergarten to Grade 4 Language Arts

Manitoba Education and Training (1998) A Foundation for Implementation: Kindergarten to Grade 4 English Language Arts

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Schon, DA (1983) The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. New York: Basic Books

Schon, DA (1993) Educating the Reflective Practitioner: Toward a New Design for Teaching and Learning in the Professions. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass

Vygotsky, LS (1962) Thought and Language. (E Hanfmann and GVokar, Trans.) Cambridge MA: MIT Press (Original work published in 1934)

Vygotsky, LS (1978) Mind and Society: The Development of Higher mental processes. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press (Original work published in 1930, 1933 and 1935)

APPENDIX

Teaching and Learning Project OutcomesGeneral Outcome I: Teachers/Student Teachers will explore language arts assessment tools and strategies.Specific Outcomes: become knowledgeable of the tools for assessment as suggested in

the ELA implementation document use those assessment tools identified by teachers/student teachers

as useful in their language environments to assess, evaluate and program language arts learning which promote student success

reflect and discuss assessment tools and strategies which have been used in their classrooms

establish future goals for acquiring increased knowledge of assessment

General Outcome II: Teachers and student teachers will increase their expertise in the use of strategies for instruction as stated in the ELA Implementation document.Specific Outcomes: use the identified strategies in classrooms discuss with colleagues the various strategies used in the classroom

and evaluate the pros and cons of these experiences and offer suggestions for revisions to the strategies

demonstrate and practice various instructional strategies coach and receive coaching while demonstrating strategies

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General Outcome III: Teachers and student teachers will increase their understanding and use of viewing and representing language arts in their classrooms.Specific Outcomes: read resource materials and attend Professional Development

sessions to gain a better understanding on viewing and representing identify various activities currently being used with viewing and

representing in early years classrooms identify and become familiar with those instructional

strategieswhich would be considered viewing and representing as stated in the ELA implementation document

Use identified activities in units and learning sequences with students

General Outcome IV: Create integrated Language Arts Units for use in early years classrooms.Specific Outcomes: Discuss various strategies and tools for integration into the new

curriculums Share strategies and tools currently being used successfully in

integrated units Generate integrated unit plans for early years classrooms including

possible assessment tools and strategies Create integrated learning sequences including assessment to share

with colleagues

General Outcome V: To participate in an intensive collaborative staff development program for student teachers and experienced teachers.Specific Outcomes:To participate in Professional Development including: session on assessment strategies and tools demonstration of various implementation strategies and

accompanying assessment assessing student work samples creating rubrics for assessment of appropriate outcomes information sessions specifically on viewing and representing possibly looking at what grade 3 standards would look like for

Grade K, 1 and 2 planning time for integrated units and learning sequences time for discussion and sharing of Language Arts ideas and

concerns

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creating future plans for implementing Language Arts instructional strategies and assessment (goal setting in Language Arts - individual, school and divisional)

These experiences are designed to enhance teachers' and student teachers' professional skills and possible future employment.

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Chapter 5

Making partnership work: From passive participation to active collaboration

Deborah Chetcuti

A THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

IntroductionThis chapter is a reflective account of my experiences as a novice researcher trying to set up a collaborative research partnership with teachers and students in schools to explore and develop new ideas about assessment practices. It is an account of how I try to translate my theoretical framework of collaborative research into practice and the difficulties and limitations I encountered. The chapter is therefore divided into three parts. In the first part I explore my own philosophical underpinnings and give reasons why I thought it was important to engage in collaborative research. The second part of the chapter turns to my experiences and interactions with teachers with schools and critically explores the difficulties and problems which I encountered in trying to develop a collaborative partnership with the teachers. The third and final part of the chapter evaluates the research process and discusses why the partnership and collaboration I dreamed of did not materialise. I reflect on what went wrong and how I could make collaboration work successfully.

The ResearchThe research was a qualitative case study carried out in six Maltese schools. The schools were chosen to represent the different types of schools in Malta, including girls’ and boys’ schools, and State and Private Church schools. The schools were also chosen to represent as wide a geographical area as possible. The research involved a number of observations in Fifth Form Physics classrooms1. (Physics was chosen as until 1995 physics was the only compulsory science subject taught in all schools.) It was a requirement for entry into post

1 Pupils are aged 15-16 in the Fifth Form.

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secondary education. A number of interviews with teachers and students in these classrooms were also carried out. For the purpose of this chapter however, I will only discuss my experiences and interactions with the teachers.

Planning the research: my theoretical frameworkWhen I started to plan the research, I need to think about how I could obtain information about my research questions. But before actually choosing the research tools I needed to think about the way in which I looked at knowledge and how this knowledge can be made known. I realised that facts cannot be separated from values and that as Berger and Luckmann (1977) argue, the reality of everyday life is socially constructed and depends on the shared meanings which we give to it. Like Lennon and Whitford (1994), I came to the conclusion that our interactions with reality ‘are mediated by conceptual frameworks or discourses, which themselves are historically and socially situated’ (p. 4). The position which I took was that there is no knowledge which is value free but that facts are shaped by the values and experiences brought to them by individuals. This position of course influenced the way in which I looked at myself as a researcher and the kind of research tools which I chose to use.

The stand that ‘facts come trailing their constituent values and cannot be separated from them’ (Griffiths, 1995: 13) indicated to me that the researcher or the knower cannot be separated from the research process and that I as a researcher would necessarily form part of the research. Here I was mainly influenced by feminist epistemologies which argue for the importance of the self or subjectivity within research. This subjectivity which becomes part of the research is as argued by Flax (1992) also dependent on our relationships with others. For me the important implication of all this was that I as the researcher would be located within the research and that I was bringing into the research my own values, experiences and subjectivities. Therefore, like Olesen (1994), I continually tried to be as reflective and reflexive as possible all throughout the research process, weaving into the research narratives who I was, and why I was making the choices about the research that I was making.

All of this led me to my research methodology. I decided to make use of a qualitative case study. This did not mean that I would not use any quantitative data since the nature of my research regarding assessment required some quantitative analysis of examination data. Like Hammersley (1990), I decided to use any data available as long

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as it allowed me to develop my research questions. However, like Porter (1994) I did not treat the qualitative and quantitative data equally and when I interpreted the data I gave greater weight to the qualitative data. I chose to place greater emphasis on the qualitative data because my study was with teachers and students and I wanted to explore the issues in what Denzin and Lincoln (1994) describe as a natural setting and to try and make sense of the phenomena in terms of the meanings which people brought to them. The implications which all of this had on my research design was that I believed that I as the researcher was only a small part of the whole research process and that most of the information which I hoped I could obtain from the research was socially situated and very much dependent on the relationship which I would build with the participants in my study. This meant that I wanted to develop a research process which started off from who I was as an individual and as a researcher and moved into a reflexive partnership with the participants of my study. I therefore turned to the literature on collaborative research methodologies. I believed that my first responsibility was to the participants of my study. I wanted them to become part of my research as I would become part of their stories.

Defining CollaborationAlthough I had decided that I wanted my research to be a collaborative partnership with the teachers involved in the study, I did not have a clear definition of what collaboration was. I started off from the ideal that ‘educational research is carried out in order to improve the education of children and students… [it must be] a personal and political improvement. Therefore there must be a strong ethical…underpinning’ (Griffiths, 1998, pp. 66-7). Like Griffiths (1998) I believed that collaboration would help to give the teachers and students voice, get empowerment, develop new knowledge and improve the education of students.

For me, collaboration at this initial stage meant co-operation and active participation and nothing more. It meant that I sought and obtained permission from the teachers to interview them, that I sought to listen to their views and their thoughts with respect and that I would look at the teachers as partners in the research that I would be doing the research with them and not about them as subjects. I tried as described by Reason (1994) to continually reflect on my behaviour in action and at the same time to behave in a fashion that invited the teachers to do the same. I believed in collaboration because I wanted

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the teachers to become part of the research, to own the research so that out of their voices, out of their empowerment, theory would emerge out of their practice. I wanted ‘to work in specific circumstances with rather than on or even for the people who inhabit them’ (Griffiths, 1998: 111). My aims for carrying out collaborative research were to improve my own teaching and learning, to give voice to teachers, to improve the education of the students, and to empower teachers to change their assessment practices. I thought that because these were positive aims and I believed in them passionately, the teachers would have the same views and without any hesitation agree to work together collaboratively to improve assessment practices.

WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED: PASSIVE PARTICIPATION / ACTIVE COLLABORATION?

While in theory I planned to carry out a study which would involve a partnership and active collaboration between myself and the teachers, what happened in practice was something entirely different. While I had no problems in gaining access to the schools and most of the teachers who I wanted to interview were very happy to air their views and state their opinions, the research remained my research. At no point in time did the teachers feel that the research was being carried out with them to bring about change. While the teachers gave freely of their time and their opinions, they remained passive participants rather than becoming the active collaborators which I had planned for.

This shift from a theoretical collaborative partnership to passive participation happened in my view because of four main reasons. The major difficulties which I encountered included:1. My own naïve ideas about collaboration and how to make it work.2. The teachers’ previous experience of research and with researchers.3. The disbelief that research could change assessment practices and

lead to action.4. The balance of power between me the researcher, coming in as an

outsider from the University and the teachers in the school. My ideas about collaborationMy initial ideas about collaboration seem to be pretty naïve. I thought that my own desire for collaboration would make it happen, that because I believed in collaboration than the teachers would believe in it to. However, as stated by Griffiths (1998), ‘collaboration is fun,

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satisfying motivating and mind-stretching and a way of working to one’s strengths. At the same time it is difficult to do well’ (p. 113). It is also a chancy business and there is very little evidence to tell us how it can be accomplished successfully (Griffiths, 1998a).

Griffiths (1998) also describes a wide degree of stages of collaboration ranging from simply obtaining permission from the subjects and stakeholders, to that of a joint enterprise where there is agreement over a particular stage of the investigation, be it research focus, data analysis or the final form of the report, to designing the research team so that it is made up of people from a range of different backgrounds. I was initially encouraged and led to believe that the research could be a collaborative partnership because access to the teachers and schools was relatively easy. In each school the Headteacher acted as the official gatekeeper and I was introduced to the physics teachers who would be able to participate in the research.

In five out of the six schools chosen, the teachers were all very willing to air their views about teaching physics and the examination. They willingly gave up their time and co-operated with me fully. I was coming in as an outsider, as a research student, but the teachers also knew me to be an official of the MATSEC (Matriculation and Secondary Education Certificate) Examinations Board. I was also an insider because I had also been a student and a teacher of physics. I was very open about the issues I wanted to explore in my research, who I was and why I was doing the research. I explained to the teachers that I wanted them to be partners in the research, that I would like to hear their views. They accepted the idea of sharing their views and they were very willing to tell me what they thought. As I noted in my field notes journal:

I am getting the feeling that the teachers really want to talk about what they think, because as soon as they see me they start talking and talking, without my even asking them to and sometimes they do not even let me get a word in edgewise… Therefore, the problem was not one of getting the teachers to

participate; they did so readily and co-operatively. The problem was that even though, I explained that I wanted them to be active participants in the research, that their views were important and that I hoped that what they were telling me would lead to change, the research remained my research, I had designed the research, it was my PhD not theirs, and while they were willing to talk, that is as far as it went.

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In one of the schools, a girls’ State school the teachers were very resistant to the idea of participating in the research. The main problem in this school was that rather than allowing me to make personal contact with the teachers as I had done in the other schools, the Headteacher insisted that she herself would introduce me to the eight physics teachers in the school in a formal manner. This immediately set the tone for all further relations with the teachers. I tried very hard to convince the teachers that I was not there as an inspector or to pass judgement on them, that I just wanted to hear their views but the teachers simply would not accept this. The main problem was that they looked upon me as a representative of the MATSEC Board, they must have thought I was spying on them and that anything which they said would be reported back to the Board. As one teacher told me:

…Can I ask a question…you’re here representing MATSEC no…I’m a bit outspoken so I don’t want to say anything which…I tried to negotiate with the teachers common grounds which were

acceptable to them and in the end they did participate in the interviews and observations but it was always from a distance and always with an air of scepticism. My relationship with the teachers in this school was coloured by my position as a MATSEC official. However, I was also other things besides a MATSEC official: I was a woman, I was younger than most of them, I had a position at University, and I had had a Private school education. All of these multiple ‘I’s could have also influenced the way in which the teachers in the schools were looking at me and could have acted as a barrier to the collaborative partnership which I so desired. I also went into the schools with a ready-made research design, with questions I wished to have answered and this did not give the teachers space to formulate their own questions, or to reflect on what they would have asked out of the research process. This was my limitation and it prevented collaboration from taking place.

The teachers’ previous experienceAnother factor which did not allow collaboration to happen was the teachers’ previous experience with research. At one school I was greeted by the school caretaker who thought I was a student teacher and told me, ‘…you’re here to do another one of those surveys aren’t you…well if you are…the Headmaster won’t be able to see you…’. When I was finally seen by the Headmaster, he apologised about the way in which I had been greeted but he told me that the school was bombarded by so many student teachers doing research projects for

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their dissertations, that it was practically impossible to allow all of them to do the research.

The teachers and Heads of school were also not very happy about the way in which they were treated by researchers be they student teachers, University lecturers or Education Officers from the Education Division. As pointed out to me by one Headteacher, researchers came into the schools, carried out their surveys, observations, and interviews and that was the last that the schools ever heard of them. The schools were never informed about the outcomes of the research, or presented with copies of the completed dissertations. As the Headteacher told me:

…I have no problem with research being carried out…I just hope that you will let us know the outcome of your findings…perhaps by sending us a copy of your study or a short summary…we would find this very useful…but it never happens…researchers just walk in and out of our schools and we never hear from them again…These experiences left the teachers and Heads of school feeling

very suspicious about any research which could be different from that which they had experienced. The teachers were in fact very surprised when I tried to include them in the research process even after the interview had been completed. During the interviews I tried to be as natural as possible and answered all questions honestly even when they were clearly expressing my own opinion. This I believed would make ‘the interview more honest, morally sound and reliable’ (Fontana & Frey, 1994: 371) because it treated the participants as equals, allowed them to express personal feelings and therefore presented a more realistic picture. I tried to be ‘a reader, a listener, a scribe, that is an audience for a performance which may allow the narrator to make new or deeper sense of his or her own trajectory’ (Huberman, 1995: 129). An example of this occurred when one of the teachers was talking to me and it was apparent that she had the wrong idea about a particular issue regarding the examination. In this case I could not let her continue with her mistaken idea and pointed this out to her during the interview:

Mrs. H: …I told them that in Paper B the highest grade you can get is a 4 and that you need to get a very high mark, almost 100% to be able to get the 4…

Myself: …Really this is not the case…let me show you some of the marks…you can actually still get a 4 with 50% of the marks…it depends upon how the comparisons and grade

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boundaries and created and this is different for each examination…I just wanted to tell you so that you can make it clear to the boys…

Mrs. H: …It’s good that you told me…so that now I can speak to them…

While being honest about who I was as a researcher made me feel that the research was more sound and authentic, at times it also made the participants very suspicious of me. As I wrote in my research journal reflecting on a particular interview:

…As I’m writing this down, I think that I have fallen into the trap. The teachers are addressing me as a MATSEC official and I have conveniently taken on this role, trying to answer their questions as honestly as I could. I feel uneasy about this as while I am sure that the teachers are sincere in all that they are saying I am also sure that it is coloured by the way in which they are looking at me…I also tried to ensure that the teachers were happy with what I

would quote from their interviews. I sent them transcripts of all the interviews and asked them for their comments. This was done following Opie (1992) in order to avoid misrepresentation and try to allow the participants a more active role. I wanted ‘to highlight the points of difference and the tensions between competing accounts as well as shared interpretations’ (Opie, 1992: 62). Again this was not very well received by the teachers. They responded by telling me that everything was okay and they did not give any feedback on what they had actually said. As one teacher said:

…it’s fine…everything’s fine…really there’s no need to see all of that again…I trust you…anyway…isn’t it just for your PhD…it’s not really going to change anything…The teachers were so used to not being consulted, that they did not

even take up the opportunity when it was presented to them. Again it was clear that they looked at the research as my research and they did not really have any important stakes in it. They resisted becoming actively involved in the research because they did not really believe that they were part of it. Again I was just coming in from the outside, tapping into their views, and leaving. This was their experience of research.

Research leading to change and empowermentThe teachers who participated in the research were also very sceptical about the idea that the research could change and empower them.

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Weiner (1994) states that ‘collaboration and reciprocity with colleagues in different sectors of education is also likely to be valuable; in the development of appropriate teaching materials, or in order to extend professional skills or personal development, or for mutual support’ (p. 119). The teachers did not believe that this could happen. As stated by one teacher:

…look decisions come from above…they never consider what we say…it’s imposed on us…they tell you we’ve decided that we’re going to do this…and we’re telling you…full stop…there isn’t an attitude of consultation…it’s like the bogey man…someone dreams up something and it happens…and nothing you or I can say will make it any different…no research…is going to change their attitude…While the teachers were willing to share the views, for a variety of

reasons, they did not believe that anything they could say would change assessment practices or empower them to do things differently. Surprisingly enough, this empowerment was felt by the students who I interviewed. At one of the boys’ schools in fact, the students felt so good about being allowed to air their views that afterwards they told their teacher:

…you know what Miss…now we’re going to ask the co-ordinator to have a meeting for students, parents and teachers…so we can change the school system…they were a bit apprehensive to come down…you know…what’s she going to ask us…is she going to test our physics…but afterwards they said…it was really good…

Perhaps this happened because the students were not aware of all the power relations involved. They looked at me simply as someone coming in to talk with them and listen to them, and that empowered them to see things differently. With the teachers the agendas were different, the stakes higher and therefore they could not see any action being taken as a result of their input.

Power relationsOver and over again in my interactions with the teachers, the issue of power arose and in retrospect as I reflect on what was actually happening as I interacted with the teachers, although I tried to convince them of their own power, and their own ability to change things, in their view I was always the one with the most power. I was the University lecturer, the MATSEC official, and the teachers tried to assert their position vis a vis my role. As one teacher told me:

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I am not an expert and I have only just started out but I try to do my best…I even had the external examiner come into my classroom because I was a borderline between an A and a B…but then everything was okay…

In this way the teachers established themselves and let me know that they too were worth something. Yet, in their eyes I was always the one who knew more than they did, they did not view me as the learner I viewed myself, but rather as someone who had all the answers. One teacher even asked for advice:

…I would appreciate some points…how do you think the lesson went…?The teachers found it difficult to cross the line and treat me as a

partner. While I tried to treat them as partners the issues of power surfaced continually. While I tried to build a trusting and honest relationship with the participants and I think that to some extent they had a trusting relationship with me, the research never moved beyond passive participation. The limitations of the way in which I set about trying to develop collaboration, my position as an outsider from the University, and the predominant belief that research does not bring about change caused the teachers to resist my attempt at collaboration.

THE WAY FORWARD

All throughout my research I tried to establish a collaborative partnership based on the ideal that ‘subjects are seen as partners in the research process…they are seen as respondents, participants, stakeholders in a constructivist paradigm that is based on avoidance of harm, fully informed consent and the need for privacy and confidentiality’ (Punch, 1994: 89). I tried to ensure a code of ethics which based on the premise that the research was a partnership rather than ‘a carrying out research on’ included:(a) I obtained the consent of the participants to carry out the research.(b) I was completely honest about the nature of the research, who I

was as a researcher and why I wanted to carry out the research.(c) I ensured the participants that any disclosures would be

confidential.(d) I allowed the participants the right to view any transcripts and

make changes if they felt that my interpretations did not represent accurately what they had said.

(e) I established a relationship of trust with teachers.

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(f) I tried to treat all participants with respect, listened to their views even when they were completely different from my own, and thanked them for their time and patience.

(g) I informed teachers about the results of the research.

These all led to the first stages of a collaborative partnership, and if collaboration is taken to simply mean ‘working together’ than collaboration did in fact take place. However, in my view, a collaborative partnership did not develop fully in the research which I carried out. The partnership remained at the level of passive participation and it never took off to the levels of active collaboration. As Griffiths (1998) suggests, ‘the reasons for collaboration are: (a) to get action; (b) to get justice, through (i) getting others’ perspectives, (ii) taking them seriously enough to be influenced by them and (iii) working together to implement action’ (p. 116). In my research the initial idea was to work with teachers to get their perspectives and to take them seriously enough to be changed by them. And indeed my views and ideas about assessment changed and evolved continually as I talked and interacted with teachers. What was missing was the idea of working together to implement action. For the teachers action was not possible as policy was imposed from above; for me action was not possible as I had looked at it only from a theoretical and not from a practical level.

What have I learnt from all of this and what would I do differently if I had to design a research project with collaboration in mind? I think that I would do the following:1. I would involve the teachers (or any participants) in the project

from the very start. This would mean meeting with the participants and brainstorming with them my ideas about the significance of the research to see whether it was significant for them too.

2. The second step would be literally to sit with the participants and decide what the research questions were going to be, how the data was going to be collected and by whom, what would be done with the data, and what action would be taken as a result of the research.

3. A third important aspect would be to define ‘collaboration’ and what collaboration was going to mean for the group. The idea of collaboration as working together to implement action needs to be clearly understood by each participant of the research.

4. Fourthly, I would try to ensure that an informal or formal understanding is reached by all the participants about their

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involvement in the research, their commitment and their ownership of the research. A consensus about the way in which the outcomes of the research would be used to improve the education of students would have to be reached.

5. Finally, I would try and bring all the participants of the research together in discussion meetings and brainstorming sessions. These meetings would take place all through the research: at the start, throughout the data collection and all through the data analysis and writing up of the research. This would ensure that all the participants are involved at all stages of the research.Will this work? Hopefully yes, but each new piece of research is a

story on its own and there are always unexpected hurdles which arise. Collaborative research involves relationships between individuals and you can never predict what will happen when two individuals or more work together. For example, recently I have been involved in developing a student teacher portfolio for the Faculty of Education of my University. This project was intended to be a ‘collaborative’ project between the Faculty of Education and the Education Division2. This time I tried to adhere to my own criteria and a representative of the Division, namely an Assistant Director of Education, Ms. Borg, was involved from the start in the project. She attended all meetings, contributed to the discussion and gave us the views of her superiors on points of issue. Minutes of all meetings were also sent to the Director of Curriculum and Education Officers were informed about all that was happening by Ms. Borg. This was all fine and well and I sincerely believed that this time, something was working.

The project in fact proceeded smoothly and we finalised a draft version of the portfolio. To make things more transparent and collaborative, when the draft version was completed it was distributed among all members of the Faculty of Education and all Education Officers who were invited to give their feedback and indeed many members of both the Faculty and the Division did give their feedback. This feedback was duly included in the portfolio and a final draft prepared. So this time, all the participants were involved from the start in the project, they were involved (through their representative) in the design of the portfolio, it was clear from the start that this was a collaborative venture, and it was also clear that the outcome would be to improve the practice of student teachers and also to improve the

2 The Education Division is the Department of Education which is run by the State and it includes the Director General of Education, Directors and Assistant Directors, Education Officers, Heads of School and all teachers.

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way in which employment was carried out by the Education Division. So the criteria mentioned by Griffiths (1998) and described in the previous paragraph were all being met.

Yet still, something unexpected cropped up. Once the final draft of the portfolio was prepared we decided to present it during a Faculty Seminar to which all Directors, Assistant Directors and Education Officers were also invited. At this very last minute, after they had agreed to everything through their representative, who had been constantly informing them about what was happening, the Education Officers turned around and stated that they had not been personally involved in the process and that they would not participate in the seminar because there were things in the portfolio they did not agree with. So even when all the mechanisms appeared to be in place, something unexpected turned up. This did not stop us from putting the portfolio through but still the collaboration did not work without a hitch.

Where does all this leave me regarding collaborative research? Clearly there can be no foolproof formula about how collaborative research can be carried out and no one answer to all the problems. I still believe in collaborative research because I believe that it is only through the involvement of individuals and through listening to multiple viewpoints, that action and the improvement of education for students can be brought about, but how to actually carry it out is another question. All I can do is to learn from each experience, each research, each project; be more practical in dealing with participants but never losing the real aim of collaborative research, that of justice and action. And hopefully, each time something new and different will emerge. As I embark on the journey of collaborative research, I know that each time I start a new journey I will start off better equipped, having learned from my experiences on other journeys. However, each new journey will be unique and different and all I can do is to ‘traverse its full length…and there travel looking, looking, breathlessly’ (Casteneda, 1968).

REFERENCES

Berger, PL & Luckmann, T (1977) The Social Construction of Reality - A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge New York: Anchor

Castaneda, C (1968) The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yagui Way of Knowledge New York: Washington Square Press

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Cohen, L, & Manion, L (1994) Research Methods in Education London: Routledge

Denzin, NK, & Lincoln, YS (1994) Handbook of Qualitative Research Thousand Oaks: Sage

Flax, J (1992) Beyond equality: gender, justice and difference In G Bock & S James (eds), Beyond Equality and Difference Routledge

Fontana, A, & Frey, JH (1994) Interviewing. In NK Denzin & YS Lincoln

Griffiths, M (1995) Making a difference: Feminism, postmodernism and the methodology of educational research British Educational Research Journal, 21(2), 219-235

Griffiths, M (1998) Educational Research for Social Justice: Getting Off the Fence Milton Keynes: Open University Press

Griffiths, M (1998a) Telling stories about collaboration: Secrets and lies? Paper presented at British Educational Research Association, Queens University, Belfast www.leeds.ac.uk/educol

Hammersley, M (1990) Classroom Ethnography Milton Keynes: Open University Press

Huberman, M (1995) Working with life history narratives. In H McEwan & K Egan (eds) Narrative in Teaching, Learning and Research New York:Teachers College Press

Lennon, K, & Whitford, M (eds) (1994) Knowing the Difference: Feminist Perspectives in Epistemology London: Routledge

Olesen, V (1994) Feminisms and models of qualitative research. In NK Denzin & YS Lincoln

Opie, A (1992) Qualitative research, appropriation of the 'other' and empowerment Feminist Review, 40, 53-69

Porter, M (1994) ‘Second-hand ethnography’ Some problems in analysing a feminist project. In A Bryman and RG Burgess (eds) Analysing Qualitative Data London: Routledge

Punch, M (1994) Politics and ethics in qualitative research. In NK Denzin & YS Lincoln

Reason, P (1994) Three reasons for participative inquiry. In NK Denzin & YS Lincoln

Weiner, G (1994) Feminisms in Education: An Introduction Buckingham: Open University Press

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Chapter 6

Parallel processes in learning to learn: A school/university partnership focused on developing the personal and social aspects of pedagogy

Colleen McLaughlin3

I initially tried to fix the well-documented differences between school-based and university-based participants; now I see them as ways to create ambiguity and points of view that push at our ideas and practices. (Johnston, 1997)

These words echo the position I have arrived at. I realise that my starting position was a naïve one in many ways and in this chapter I shall try to chart my learning and that of the teacher partners about the process of collaboration. The focus of the partnership was an action research project, which is detailed below. My prime concern in this chapter is to look at collaboration as a facilitator of teacher development and research in a school/university partnership. What are the implications of what was learned for the facilitation of teacher development and research?

THE PROJECT AND ITS AIMS

The project was an action research project conducted over a two-year period in three secondary schools in East Anglia, UK. This was the English arm of an international research project involving Higher Education institutions and teachers from Holland, Russia and the United States of America. This international project is known as Action Research in Teacher Education1. The research focused on the development of the 3 I would like to acknowledge Rob Robson’s role as critical friend in the writing of this chapter.1 The other collaborators are the Algemene Hogeschool, Amsterdam; the Institute for Pedagogical Innovations, Moscow; and the Centre for Applied Research and Improvement in Education, University of Minnesota, USA.

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teacher’s role in developing learning to learn, learning to live and learning to choose i.e. the affective or personal and social elements of pedagogy. Another aim of the research project nationally and internationally was the study of teacher development through action research and its facilitation.

STARTING UP AND LAYING THE FOUNDATIONS

The research was initiated by the School of Education. I was the project director and I sought to identify three schools and three key members of staff who had experience of research (often through a Masters or Diploma course at the School of Education). They also needed to be committed to the area of research, willing and able to lead a team of teachers in each school. The ‘familiarity thing’ as it was called by one of the head teachers was an important factor and one that was seen as important to the establishment of a successful collaboration by both the teachers and the head teachers. It required what one of the heads called a ‘welcoming school’ i.e. one that was prepared to take on the development arising from the action research. These were important elements later in dealing with the inevitable conflicts and tensions that arise. It required flexibility and commitment. The model of action research was also seen as important in that it was seen as having credibility. Since the teachers were engaged primarily for the development of their practice this was key to them. The idea that this was not research solely for the benefit of the higher education institution was important. The aim was to move away from the traditional model of schools being researched on, which a head described as ‘like having a tooth extracted’.

We drew on previous research on action research and school development to establish the following structures at the start (Elliott, 1998: Fullan, 1991):

Teams of staff in schools with a team leader who had experience of research and was to act as facilitator. This person was also someone who had access to senior management decision making

Money for release from the classroom for the research work Regular meetings of the whole project team i.e. the teachers from

all three schools Regular meetings of the head teachers of the three schools

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There were three strands or agendas. The first was the aim to research the teachers’ development and learning; the blocks and barriers to this; and to share this data with other higher education colleagues in the project and in the wider educational community. The second was to facilitate the development of practice amongst the teacher partners and research this. The third strand was that of school development. We were aware of the limitations of many teacher action research projects and we aimed to research the development to the wider community of teachers in the participant schools. The contact with the head teachers and their prior commitment to take this on at a whole school level was part of this purpose. So I felt three different senses of accountability – to the academic community and to my funders to deliver the goods in terms of research; to the teachers; and to the head teachers who were committing to the research. This was a continuing tension for me and one I will describe in more detail later, I will divide this analysis into two parts. In the first part I will outline the process of development that the teachers went through and their shift to an awareness of the importance of a dialogic relationship with their students. In the second part I will outline my awareness that there were parallel processes in the project group.

TOWARDS COMPLEXITY AND DIALOGUE: SHIFTS IN THE TEACHERS’ THINKING AND PRACTICE

At the beginning of the research process and in keeping with the reconnaissance phase of action research we adopted an open stance and took the very broad and general question, ‘What and how can teachers develop students' ability to learn to learn, learn to live and learn to choose?’ We also committed to engage the student perspective throughout the process and as fully as we could. This resulted in a first task where teachers and students jointly observed a day’s worth of teaching. What emerged for all the teachers in the three separate schools was an engagement with and surprise at the student data. They became fascinated by the difference in perspective and the astuteness of the student comments. There began to be an almost immediate shift to engage in a dialogue with the students and to involve them more. In all three schools listening to the student perspective became a central thrust of the research. The student data was challenging and yet it was seen by one teacher as ‘rich and of great value. I was surprised that even difficult

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pupils had some perceptive and intelligent points that needed to be heard. Before I might have been more likely to dismiss them.’ Another teacher said, ‘What amazed me was the response, what you can actually get, the quality that you can get, especially from the students. That has really amazed me.’

The three projects decided to focus on listening, feedback and students’ perceptions of the teacher-student relationship with particular emphasis on its relationship to learning. The teachers were moving to a position in which dialogue with students was becoming more important, ‘it makes you think what it is like from their point of view.’ They distinguished between ‘hearing’ students and listening as an active process that permeated all aspects of classroom practice. The students were clearly saying that they wanted dialogue with the teachers. The students said that having a listening teacher helped them to feel respected, ‘we respect them if they respect us, so we work harder’. Some felt that it improved their learning, ‘It makes you feel more confident and more enthusiastic and more happy to learn.’ Others mentioned caring. Others mentioned understanding, ‘They listen to your problems and they understand you. They help you and want you to learn and they don’t give up.’ A ‘listening teacher’ fostered closer working relationships and made the students feel valued, but it was also clearly connected to learning. They felt that a listening teacher improved learning conditions i.e. because they can help and you can learn more easily. They identified an increase in motivation to learn when the conditions for a dialogue with the teacher were present. ‘If they don’t listen to you then you will sulk and not listen or learn.’ They were also clear about the emotional effects of not being listened to. They felt angry, annoyed, sad, bad, cross, upset and let down when no one listened to them. One student summed it up thus, ‘Because we are individuals we need to be listened to just like anyone else or any teacher.’ ‘It makes me feel as though the teacher cares about my learning and not just wanting pay.’

DialogueMany have written on and explored the notion of dialogue. First, dialogue is distinguished from other forms of interaction or conversation. Bohm (1990) talks about the difference between discussion and dialogue. Discussion he says is breaking things apart and analysing, this he argues leads to different points of view. He sees discussion as goal oriented and

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the more typical form of discourse in organisations. Dialogue on the other hand is like a stream running between two banks and it is the stream that counts. The outcome of dialogue is shared meaning. Second, dialogue is characterised as necessarily democratic. Freire (1994) says

I simply cannot think for others or without others. Dialogue between teachers and students does not place them on the same footing professionally but it does mark the democratic position between them. Teachers and students are not identical .. after all it is the difference between them that makes them precisely students or teachers. Dialogue is meaningful precisely because the dialogical subjects, the agents in the dialogue, not only retain their identify, but actively defend it and thus grow together.

Giddens (1999) also argues for dialogue and a democracy of the emotions in relationships. This notion of democracy necessarily raises issues of power.

These two notions of the constructivist approach to learning and the adoption of a more democratic position were both evident changes in the teachers over time. They built structures into the research process and their teaching to allow for this i.e. students as co-researchers; feedback processes as part of their teaching and they also showed evidence of using their power as teachers differently.

I will say to them, ‘Look, this is how you are presenting yourself. Do you think that’s the best way that you could do this?’ And I will say ‘Well look, you could do this.’ Or ‘What else could you do?’ and you know that you are using the skills that you have got. You are saying ‘Well OK, You helped to find the problem. You try and work out what options you have got and then you decide what you are going to do to try and make things better.And:.... it's reinforced listening- with my year 10 group I try not to have too much direction from the front... to get everybody individually working rather than one or two hands up ... and that's really helped me, and that is helping my pupils.

The teachers moved to seeing themselves as learners and that practice was more mutable than previously thought. ‘I thought that it was very difficult to improve a bad teacher because their skills were so closely connected to their personality and it is very difficult to change someone’s personality…. Yet when you start to break down the skills required, many

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of them can be learnt. This makes the teacher the learner as well as the pupil.’

This was neither a quick nor an easy process. In fact I worried that we were going too slowly and as a facilitator the temptation was to rescue us all from this sense of not having things sorted out. ‘I’ve learnt an awful lot, it’s been excellent and it’s been awful at times as well, just pressure and thinking - what am I doing? I’ve felt very confused at times but then I felt suddenly I understood it again and that gave me the energy to do it. So on the whole I’m really glad I’ve done it. I’ve enjoyed it a lot, but there have been real highs and real lows as well.’ Some teachers were frightened of a dialogue. In one school the teachers moved outside of their project group to work with all the teachers of one particular class. In discussing how to develop listening, a teacher said, ‘The things they want us to listen to we don’t want to hear. What they see as important and what we see as important are different.’ This teacher was expressing many things. First, the fear of hearing something we do not want to. Second, the fear of loss of control which can be closely linked to listening and dialogue for there is a connection here between expression of emotion and authority. Listening is emotionally challenging and having a dialogue of the sort described previously is disturbing. There are inevitable links between issues of dialogue and issues of power and powerlessness Third, that dialogue is not always necessarily the only form of discourse in a classroom.

So the teachers were experiencing and uncovering disturbance as they focused on dialogues between themselves and their students and themselves and their colleagues. The group became more and more important to the project members. There were different constituencies within the project. There was the in-school group; there was the inter-school project group; and there was the national group (the English teachers met with the Dutch teachers and the in-school team leaders also came to a conference in America to discuss with the Dutch, American and Russian participants). There were loyalties and tensions at times between all of these sub groups. The emotional dimensions of such collaboration have been discussed elsewhere (McLaughlin and Ponte, 1997.) However, the teachers gradually asked to meet more frequently and this was a surprise to me since I had been attempting to lessen demands as time was always a pressure. The teachers later stated that the group meeting was the most important facilitating factor for them. ‘I

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don’t think I started to think constructively until we met and discussed.’ They placed great value on the space to reflect in a setting where they could engage each other without interruption and with critical feedback. They rated the facilitating forces in order of priority as:

meeting as a project team gathering and analysing data collaboration with the university having supply cover collaboration with pupils coming out of the classroom collaboration with other schools

PARALLEL PROCESSES: THE FACILITATOR’S PERSPECTIVE

Freire (1994) talks of the importance of the need for all to be engaged in reflection.

Dialogue cannot exist without humility. The naming of the world through which people constantly re-create that world cannot be an act of arrogance. Dialogue is broken if the parties (or one of them) lack humility. How can I dialogue if I always project ignorance onto others and never perceive my own? How can I dialogue if I regard myself as a case apart form others - mere ‘its’ in whom I cannot recognise other ‘I’s? How can I dialogue if I consider myself a member of the in-group of ‘pure’ men, the owner of truth and knowledge for whom all non-members are ‘these people’ or the ‘great unwashed?’

Gradually I began to see that there were parallel processes occurring in the project group. As the group became more important to the teachers and we began to work much more collaboratively, I began to see the issues of dialogue, identity, power and tension within the project group.

I realised that there were many unspoken assumptions and decisions being taken that had not been open for discussion. We moved to a much more negotiating model. Decisions about the research design, the pace of work, finance and overall structure, which had traditionally been the province of the higher education partners, were now being negotiated. So the changes in the use of power and authority that had occurred with the teachers in their classrooms were being mirrored in the project group. The

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effect of this was disturbance for me but also an increased involvement and sense of responsibility for the project from the whole project group.

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THE EMOTIONAL NATURE OF COLLABORATION

The teachers were finding this process an emotional one. The emotional nature of collaboration and teaching has been explored by many writers (Hargreaves, 1998; Nias, 1991; Dadds, 1993). The exploration of practice and the disturbance that comes with reflection were very present in the group. As a facilitator I felt this disturbance too and took on the responsibility for holding and channelling it. One of the issues was an awareness of the different discourses present. There was the discourse of management and accountability. The head teachers wanted to see outcomes and the initial slow pace of the open, exploratory phase at the beginning of the research process was seen as evidence that nothing was happening. This concerned them and me. However this was in tension with the teachers’ perception that this lack of early closure was highly significant for them. Theirs was at this stage a discourse that was much more about learning and caring. (Noddings, 1992) The teachers wanted at this stage to be permitted to be exploratory. ‘No pressure from anywhere to produce startling results’ was seen as a highly significant factor at this stage. There was the language of the funding body and the academic community. Here the emphasis was on validity and rigour. These are entirely appropriate but were running alongside the need to protect the teachers from becoming research gofers. One teacher said that ‘Realistic goals’ and ‘No pressure to record own thoughts/feelings in endless diaries and questionnaires’ was a real priority. Managing these different discourses was a creative tension and extended my view of my role. I saw the necessity to be an advocate (for the students, the teachers and the academics at different times) and to act as a gatekeeper of demands and agendas. There is a need to accept the emotion of leadership and to take responsibility for the emotional dimension of the collaboration. The image of dialogue as a stream running between two banks was referred to earlier. I began to see also that the banks were important. They were the boundaries and limitation of dialogue. It was important to hold the boundaries as well as let the dialogue flow. The need to discriminate between different types of discourse is part of this.

Identity and tensionsThe emotional and intellectual support being provided through the whole project group was enabling the teachers to tolerate the disturbance and

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continue to challenge and explore their research and practice. However the very strength of the group and the growing group identity was also a tension for these teachers back in their own schools. One of the aims of the collaboration was to keep the work rooted in the schools and to facilitate development in the whole school as a result of the research. It was clear that this tension between the project being the ‘Cambridge project’ and the ownership by colleagues was present. As project director it was important to maintain and facilitate open communication. This had to be insisted upon and required perseverance.

Power and languageThe third major issue for me was that of language and power. Socio- linguists describe ideal speech communities as sharing knowledge and behaviour in common. It is characterised by patterns of language use, interpretation, rules of speaking and attitudes concerning language, which are identifiably specific. I have already discussed Freire’s ideal community where there is a democratic and constructivist approach (Freire, 1994.) I have also described the attempts to work towards such a community in the project. At the final residential conference the issues of language, power and powerlessness emerged.

First there was a frustration with the limitations of language as practitioners. One of the team leaders wrote of his frustration with ‘a lack of vocabulary to talk about our own profession and practice.’ This sense of frustration was also felt about jargon. Another teacher talked about jargon as a debilitating force for him. There is a tension here between the desire for a specialist vocabulary - one way of describing jargon - and the sense of inferiority and powerlessness that some of the teachers felt when they felt left out of this speech community.

The power of language and the sense that certain forms of language were superior and more powerful was a big issue. I had invited some colleagues from the School of Education to act as critical friends to our final data analysis and discussion. I became aware that these colleagues were seen as dominant and that as this occurred the teachers became silent. It was what was not being said that became important. It seemed to me that there were parallels here with the teachers’ own research with students. Just as the students described holding back and not speaking about important issues when they felt the teachers were not listening so it seemed that similar processes were occurring in the group. As a

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facilitator I realised that my role was to focus on cues about what was not being said and those issues of power, powerlessness and language continue throughout. Johnston (1997) talks of constantly talking about the tensions and that the teachers expressed frustration with that. This seems to be an important process. The monitoring of the language and power issues is necessary throughout.

The final issue related to language and power was that of the writing and dissemination of the project. This related to whose voices would be heard in the written accounts of the work. The teachers had strong views about ownership and the research. One said in an interview:

I feel that the research should be in the hands of practising teachers. I feel that is important. I think that as soon as you have been out of teaching for a few years you do not know what is going on. Teaching is a very different ball game from when I started. So I do think that the action and the research should be in the hands of practising teachers. But I think it needs the time to do it.The written outcomes of the research were debated and different

audiences and discourses were identified. The different constituencies had different needs. The final outcomes were an A4 summary for the schools, a portfolio of development materials based on the research findings, case studies written by the team leaders and the more conventional papers to be written by the higher education partners. I am not sure how comfortably this sits with me. It could be said that we negotiated the different agendas and met the demands of the different groups; it could equally be said that we did not fully address the issues of power and status of voice.

These dilemmas in collaboration have been recorded by others. Johnston (1997: 15) cited the following tensions in collaboration (See Fig. 1)

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Figure 1. Tensions In Collaboration

RelationshipChallenge SupportIndividuality CommunityConfrontation Agreement

StructuralProcess ProductOpenness supports Innovation

Structure supports continuity

Time to reflect Time to actOpenness Focus

Developmental tensionsBeing BecomingRisk taking ComfortDifferences promote learning

Sameness promotes comfort

These tensions were mirrored in the work of this project too.

CONCLUDING REMARKS

There were many different tasks as a facilitator of a school-university partnership. This collaboration had different phases and these were marked by different tasks. These are set out in the following diagram. With hindsight I see the initial phase of setting up the partnership as very important for it is here that the grounds for dealing with the different tensions and agendas are laid. The handling of different discourses is an ongoing task throughout the process as is the need to move between the different groups as an advocate. Just as the teachers felt that they saw the role of advocate for students as important to learning, so I saw the role of advocate or holder of the boundaries as an important one in the process.

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Figure 2. The Stages and Tasks of Facilitation

STAGE OF PARTNERSHIPStarting the partnership

TASKS

Finding out about the decision making systems, communication structures and planning cycles of the school.Establishing teams and team building.Setting up systems of communication - outsider to insider partners, insider to insiders, short and long term.Negotiating the demands of the project and the resources (time, finance, opportunities to meet both internally and externally)Agreeing timescales and structures of operationSignalling the demands to all concerned.Bringing out into the open the tensions between different agendasSecuring the support of all key decision-makers.

Dialogue for development - starting the research work

Establishing the language and climate for ways of working inclusive of all culturesTaking the time to find a focus and agree research design.Gatekeeping the demands.Deciding the voices in the research and managing the different discourses.Agreeing the ethics.

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Maintaining the momentum

Maintaining the pace and overseeing the demandsDealing with shifts and being flexible about needs and support.Focusing on outcomes and actionKeeping all the partners in communication.

Ending, sharing and planning for development of outcomes

Allowing time for joint reflection on outcomes and planning dissemination into the school/s and to outside communities.Ensuring that this is in accord with internal decision making and is timely.

Widening The Circle Acting on the plan of going out to the wider school and educational community

REFERENCES

Bohm, D (1990) On Dialogue Ojai, California: David Bohm SeminarsDadds, M (1993) The feeling of thinking in professional self-study

Educational Action Research, 1 (2) 287-303Dixon, N (1998) Dialogue at Work London: Lemos and CraneElliott, J (1998) Action Research for Educational Change Milton Keynes:

Open UniversityFullan, M (1991) The New Meaning of Educational Change London:

CassellFreire, P (1994) (Revised edition) The Pedagogy of the Oppressed New

York; Continuum Publishing Giddens, A (1999) The Reith Lectures London: BBC Radio 4 Hargreaves, A (1998) The Emotional Politics of Teaching and Teacher

Development: With Implications for Educational Leadership International Journal of Leadership in Education, 1 (4): 315-336

Johnston, M (1997) Contradictions In Collaboration – New Thinking On School/University Partnerships New York: Teachers College Press

McLaughlin, C and Ponte, P (1997) Assumptions and Challenges: The Emotional Aspects Of Cross-Cultural Collaboration British Journal of In-service Education 23 (1) 1997 101-110

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Nias, J (1991) Changing times, changing identities: grieving for a lost self. In Burgess, RC (Ed) Educational Research and Evaluation: For Policy and Practice London and New York: Falmer Press

Noddings, N (1992) The Challenge to Care in Schools New York; Teachers’ College Press

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Chapter 7

Partnerships are mortal: Debunking the myth of partnership as the answer for improving education

Renee Clift, Sharon Chubbuck, Joanne Allard and Jane Quinlan

Partnership. In many arenas this term is coming to mean the optimal form with which to meet the growing need for the recruitment, professional development, and retention of pre-service and in-service teachers (Goodlad, 1993; The Holmes Group, 1986, 1990, 1995; Intriligator, 1992; Johnson & Kirschner, 1996; Sirotnick & Goodlad, 1988; Su, 1991). For many, they are offered as enduring, stable solutions to the meet the growing needs of education and teacher education combined. For example, in the United States two rounds of competitive grants, funded by the Department of Education’s Teacher Quality Enhancement program have established partnerships between teacher preparation institutions and schools identified as high needs schools (defined in terms of low standardized test scores and the percentage of teachers teaching out of field). The assumptions underlying this initiative are that Departments in the Arts and Sciences and Departments of Education can work together with schools and businesses to simultaneously improve teacher education, teacher quality, and P-12 student achievement.

While we would not deny that partnerships among the various stakeholders in education can be valuable, we are concerned that the term ‘partnership’ is beginning to assume almost mythic qualities. Recommendations for cross-institutional partnering are often cast as stories or recommendations that receive uncritical acceptance by a group and support a particular practice institutional entity – one that is potentially enduring, stable, and perhaps even ‘immortal’ once it is created. We offer the following story of one partnership in progress in order to challenge this concept and to recognize that both the partners and Partnership are all too human and, most definitely, mortal.

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CRITIQUING PARTNERSHIP THROUGH STUDYING OURSELVES

Beginning in 1996 staff members from two regional offices of education and one university in Illinois agreed to design a program for professional development and support for area novice teachers, which we named the Novice Teacher Support Project (NTSP). In 1999 a third regional office joined the partnership, thus bringing two more counties into the process – and two more staff members who were not involved with the original design, implementations, and ongoing evaluation. Over time, the project has evolved from a series of Saturday work sessions to include summer institutes, annual state-wide conferences, an interactive web-site, and an attempt to replicate the partnership in two other areas of Illinois. What began as a low profile initiative has become a high profile, high stakes project due to increased state funding, which was granted with the condition that the project expand. Both the increased visibility and the expansion, while welcomed, have caused us to question and rethink several of our own assumptions about the value and nature of partnerships and our level of involvement.

The four co-authors are women who were closely and collaboratively involved in the formation and direct implementation of this partnership in its beginning stages. From the initial conception of the project we have engaged in a series of reflective conversations about our experiences with both the project and with one another. Through the medium of collective self-study we are examining our understanding of ourselves as partners and of the nature of our partnership. Now in its fourth year, the focus of our self-study has become more complex.

Much of our initial emphasis centered on program formation and efficacy with the goal of improving the quality of induction support we were able to provide for our teachers. We have engaged formative evaluation of the NTSP from the onset, using a variety of data sources including surveys of participants’ perceptions of the project, focus groups, and interviews. In the spring of 2000 an external evaluation team augmented our internal efforts in a written report analyzing the degree to which we were meeting the stated project goals. Our self-study, however, is the result of recognizing the importance of a more reflective, in-depth examination of each of our personal experiences of the partnership and how those personal experiences melded into the whole partnership

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dynamic. This kind of examination is not often a part of the formal literature on partnership formation and maintenance, as Joanne has noted in her dissertation literature review, in progress.

To produce this chapter we engaged in individual and collective discussions of the impact of the project on ourselves. We exchanged e-mail, met for informal reflective conversations, wrote our individual stories, and shared our written reflections in two group discussion sessions. At the beginning of each session, we silently read the reflections from the other participants looking for common themes. Next, we shared reactions and discussed common themes across all reflections. Much, but not all of our conversation and dialogue has been taped, transcribed to hard copy, and synthesized in our writing about our partnership experience. We then identified three dominant themes that characterised our experiences and checked our individual stories and experiences against those three themes. Finally, we began writing and rewriting and rewriting a formal paper – while the partnership continued to evolve. Our revisions have allowed us to check our original themes against the evolution of the partnership and, while we have not abandoned our original themes, we have modified our conclusions in light of our most recent experiences.

Our self-study has allowed us to ‘talk our way’ to an understanding of partnership that reveals the significant impact of the personal and private as sources of both strength and weakness in partnership formation and maintenance. Each of us is the actor in our individual story and also in others’ stories. Our lives and actions intersect, diverge, and intersect again. In the next section we present portions of our individual stories, deliberately choosing NOT to standardize the formats or the plots.

SHARON - THE CHRISTIAN ACTIVIST TURNED FULL TIME GRADUATE STUDENT

I remember the beginning of the partnership for me - five people sit around a restaurant table littered with iced tea glasses and empty bottles of root beer. My first meeting with the Steering Committee of the Novice Teacher Support Project as the newly hired research assistant to help coordinate the formation of the NTSP. Conversation flows around me, undisturbed by my entrance.

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‘I couldn’t believe what Joe had to say about the IFT and IEA!’ ‘Well, when the rules and regs committee finally meets to talk about the implications of the Illinois Learning Standards for the new teacher certification process, watch out!’

I make a hasty note on the side of my notebook - Find out who Joe is. Find out about new certification process - and I look around the table. Renee, my professor and now boss; Jane, rein-holder of professional development in the two districts and soon to be my collaborator; Marty and Jim, ‘good old boys’ who lead their regional offices of education with wisdom and political savvy and who registered nearly nothing upon my arrival; Joanne, high school principal and also fellow doctoral student; and now me, close in age to all of these people yet just beginning a doctoral program and still somewhat winded by the daily reminders of all I didn’t know. I am entering a new job, and I have no idea what it will entail and how relationships with this people will develop.

Daily Implementation. Eventually, I find myself doing my job with growing confidence, no longer wondering who Joe is. Renee calls me in to her office where we talk about proposal drafts for conferences and grants. She says things like ‘Talk about the needs assessment findings and so on. You can fill it in.’ I take notes, my confidence wavering as I wonder if my knowledge of ‘and so on’ will be sufficient for me to ‘fill it in,’ when the conversation shifts. ‘How are your classes going?’ And another day ‘I don’t want to be on your committee. I want to maintain our relationship as equals, not with me as your evaluator.’ And still another day ‘How is your daughter doing? My son…’ Laughter, exchange of daily life, and collaboration are becoming more common boss/employee or professor/student interactions….

…Joanne and I sit knee to knee, sketching out the plans for the coming year. ‘Let’s get some coffee.’ Again, knee to knee at the small round table of the coffee shop. Talk moves from novice teachers to our families, our hopes, our faith. We explore realms of commonality we never imagined existed….

…The car is eating up the miles to Naperville as Jane and I head off to a state conference. Snippets of information and questions about the NTSP, pepper our initial conversation. Quickly, however, the talk moves

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to researchers’ analysis and reflection. Sound bytes of content are replaced by long, thoughtful exploration of the roles and relationships that mark this partnership. Soon enough, we are talking about the joys and trials of raising strong-willed daughters, demonstrating and at the same time building a relationship that goes well beyond that of colleagues. The shared knowledge and jokes that we have created will travel with us for who knows how long….

The expansion. Sitting around a conference table in a big, posh room. Significantly different from the restaurant table littered with iced tea glasses and root beer bottles. Our numbers have grown. Now we must redefine ourselves as partners. What had been an organic, relationally based organism is now struggling into an institutional structure that can run smoothly with interchangeable parts. The process is not going particularly smoothly and time is growing short. Renee speaks. ‘All right. I am going to give some assignments for our next meeting. We need to define the role of the advisory board. Marianne, that will be your job. Jane, you describe the nature of the Steering Committee. Marty,….’ It is a defining moment - Renee’s personal strength and the power accorded to her because of it were needed. Without an exercise of that power on someone’s part, we would continue to flounder in our efforts to expand and redefine the partnership. Yet, how does that power impact the personal energies that have made us who we are? How will it impact the inclusion of new members to the partnership, who lack our shared vision and relational history?

The separation. I clearly remember the day Renee and I talked about the real possibility that the NTSP would not be funded for the third year. My memory is that she asked me what I would do for a job that coming fall. The reality is that my desire to teach and to immerse myself in my dissertation study had already begun to raise the possibility of doing something else, but the feeling of being friends and equals was shaken in that conversation. Not shaken by the people, per se, but by the situation. It was clear that my relationship to the NTSP and the people involved was that of a hireling. Yet more. I knew that my concern over the success of the project would not end if my paycheck ended. I knew that my affection for the people I

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worked with would not end if my job ended. I felt the uncomfortable ambivalence of being ‘dumped by a boyfriend’ I knew I could not stay with indefinitely anyway. Overstated perhaps, but the metaphor captures some of the emotion.

JOANNE - THE HIGH SCHOOL PRINCIPAL AND RETURNING GRADUATE STUDENT

When I was a little girl, my grandmother was a very important part of my life. Grandma loved to make up stories about a little brown-eyed girl who had wonderful adventures in the forest. The stories would always start with the little brown-eyed girl setting off down the path, sometimes alone, sometimes with others. Sometimes she met dangers along the way and sometimes wonderful surprises awaited her.

In 1996, the little brown-eyed girl was feeling less than confident and hopeful. Her father had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, and her mother was not coping well with care-giving. Both parents looked to the little brown-eyed girl for encouragement, support, and respite, and she was feeling weighed down and inadequate. The little brown-eyed girl's professional life was equally unsettled. She had been working on an advanced degree for six years. Her first attempt at selecting a dissertation topic had fallen flat after several months' work. The little brown-eyed girl loved her job as principal of a little rural high school, but her school board and the moms and dads who thought she was very good at being a principal, weren't too impressed with the letters ‘Ph.D.’ after somebody's name - thought it was putting on airs. Needless to say, the little brown-eyed girl was feeling pretty much alone, unappreciated, and dead-ended, seriously questioning her own vocational choices. The little brown-eyed girl was ready to find a new adventure

The little brown-eyed girl joined her friend Wendy in a course at the University of Illinois called ‘Research on Teaching,’ hoping to find the Question to jumpstart her dissertation study one more time. Well, the little brown-eyed girl made many new friends in the class especially Renee, the teacher, and Sharon, a classmate. Renee suggested that the little brown-eyed girl might be interested in working with Sharon and Wendy and herself on a new Partnership project. The Partnership People, - Renee, and Jim, and Marty, and Jane - wanted to work together to help new teachers make the important transitions necessary in the first two or

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three years in the classroom. She could help with the research and maybe even use the Partnership as a dissertation topic.

Well, the little brown-eyed girl was so happy! Working for the Partnership People was exciting and fun, too. The Partnership People would meet at Ned Kelly's and eat Bloomin' Onions and laugh and plan and dream. They were interested in what she had to say and asked her to do important things. She was learning so much! So the Partnership People created a program for new teachers and called it the Novice Teacher Support Project. The program grew and each year, there were more new teachers who wanted to be a part of the project. The work was difficult, but everybody worked and all the different talents got the job done.

The little brown-eyed girl was so proud of what the Partnership People were doing, but she began to notice that often, she had to run to catch up to the Partnership People who had gone on ahead on the path while she tarried behind working at the little rural school. Some other things made her sad. The Partnership People were very busy with their day jobs just like the little brown-eyed girl. It became more and more difficult for all of them to get together and eat Bloomin' Onions and laugh and plan and dream. The little brown-eyed girl got a new boss who didn't like it when she left school early for meetings or research in the university library. He never asked the little brown-eyed girl anything about the Partnership.

One day the little brown-eyed girl stopped and looked around. She realized that it was time for her to let the Partnership People go on ahead down the path without her. She really wasn't one of them anymore. There were other Partnership People who could do the important work, and besides, it was just Time—not time for the End of the story, but Time for her to find a new adventure. Time for a new story for the little brown-eyed girl.

RENEE - THE UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR AND ADMINISTRATOR

I seldom keep a journal; I seldom engage in reflective thinking on paper or on computer. Instead, I prefer to talk with colleagues and, through that interaction, to sort out my own views, identify and solve problems, and plan for the future. In my high school teaching career and now in my university career, I have had both positive and negative experiences with talking to others. With some people, my talking about a problem results

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in being labeled a problem. With others, the dynamics suggested a feeling that the relationship would never move beyond a status hierarchy and that I was either resistant to authority or that I was in authority and was refusing to provide others with the answers. With a very, very few people, a reflective conversation resulted in a trip to the principals’ office, or to the department head’s or dean’s office because of a complaint lodged over an issue that arose as a result of my being either candid, or musing aloud, or both. But with Jane and Sharon and Joanne, I could be me - I could identify problems without being labeled a problem. I could worry or rejoice without fear of alienation or rejection - or could I?

Secrets. When I was in elementary school I both engaged in and was excluded from conversations in which information - secrets - were exchanged among the ‘knowers’ to the exclusion of the others. While I certainly preferred (and prefer) to be a knower and hated to be one who was excluded, I felt that early on in the partnership formation we had managed to avoid keeping information (or even general observations) from one another. Last summer, however, I learned that not only was I wrong, but that I still carried the elementary child inside of me. A possibly trivial incident occurred - I walked into a conversation in which one of my university colleagues, Sharon, was sharing a mild complaint about another university colleague with Jane and another ROE staff member. As I approached the group, a sentence was stopped, looks were exchanged, and the secret was protected as I was told that I could not participate in the conversation. I acted in a ‘calm, rational, and totally adult’ manner by apologizing for intruding and walking away - as only one who is a trained ‘pouter’ can walk…

Drowning, Part One. One of my favorite poems is one by Stevie Smith that tells of a swimmer, not too far from shore who is ‘not waving, but drowning’ as she frantically gestures for help. For me, that occurred in December. My partnership jobs included supervising the evaluations, the web-site, and the incorporation of new partners. We were also interviewing secretaries, dealing with a certain and totally unformed series of future tasks, and trying to create a brochure that would publicize our project far beyond the five county region. There were other demands, too. Demands totally

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unrelated to the NTSP, but to my other jobs. Then the telephone calls came -- a mother who was diagnosed with a mass in her lung. A mother-in-law diagnosed with breast cancer. It was not a good time…I pick up the office telephone call and Jane reassures me that I can drop a few of the NTSP tasks. That's what partners (and friends) are for…

Drowning, Part Two. But even friendship has its limits. In late December the partnership steering committee met for a second session in which we all worked very hard to create an infrastructure that would accommodate the ‘new’ partners from the third regional office. After all but four of us left, I asked Jane how she thought it went. She told me. The communication between individuals in my office and hers was not working. The communication with the new office was non-existent. Tasks and decisions were being second guessed. People were checking up on others - and conveying that those others were untrustworthy - and more. I was shocked, stunned, and totally apologetic. Should we even continue this self-study?

JANE - THE PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT DIRECTOR FOR TWO REGIONAL OFFICES OF EDUCATION

The project has always operated on the edge in terms of urgency and important. The 1999-2000 year started the same way because we didn't find out about funding until August, and it was late August before we met with the superintendent from the counties that would be joining the project. Because of the additional activities, the increased number of participants, and the additional new people involved in planning and implementation, this year has been a greater struggle. I initially thought that adding staff would take some of the work and pressure off me. However, as the year continued, there seemed to be more ‘crises’ and work to do. In addition, the new people didn't seem to have an understanding of the project or to feel strongly about it. They didn’t seem to be willing to work in the same way that we had worked before.

During the first two years of the project, the pace had been hectic, but working with the Steering Committee had generally been fun. In addition, we had implemented some activities about which I felt proud. This year was not fun; it felt like work and not very satisfying work. I realize that this is an exaggeration, but I felt like Cari (Sharon’s replacement) and/or

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Renee were calling every day and sometimes several times a day and at the end of every call, I had something else to take care of. Often when I would come in to my office, there would be a message waiting for me. I felt that I no longer controlled my participation in the project, but that I was on everyone else's timeline. On several occasions, Renee talked to Marty and Jim about the stress we were under or the workload. While I intellectually knew that she was trying to be helpful, I often felt during the conversations that people thought I couldn't handle my job. I also felt frustrated with Jim and Marty, particularly when Jim said to me that he didn't understand what took so much time with the project. I feel as if I am trapped between having always taken care of everything for the ‘boys’ and then finding out they have no clue what work I do. In addition, I felt that it was my problem with Marty and Jim to work out, not Renee’s. None of these feelings are particularly rational, but…. I planned to talk with Renee on several occasions, but each time I worked out what I wanted to say, things would seem better and I'd let it pass. When we finally ‘talked’ in December, I was unprepared, but it happened and it is good that it did. Renee started the conversation and that was helpful because I have a tendency to take my cards and go home when things are not working.

As the expanded steering committee met during the fall, I felt like we were not getting enough done. We were trying to both build the infrastructure and implement the activities. There seemed to be no one on the committee who was interested in doing ‘work,’ and that added to the feeling that the project was more than we could do. I thought that Renee wanted to be less involved in the day-to-day operations of the project, and I certainly did to be less involved, but it didn't seem like anyone else wanted to assume those responsibilities or needed our help in assuming them. I also felt at times that multiple people were taking care of the same activity and other pieces of the project were unattended. In the past, Renee, Sharon, and I seemed able to informally keep track of all aspects of the project, and this fall it seemed liked no one knew what was going on. As the year has gone on, things have improved. Our ‘talk’ last December cleared the air, and I think Renee doesn't call as frequently. I try to check e-mail on Tuesdays and Thursdays and that helps. I am still not sure about the value of the stress related to the expansion, however…

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INTERSECTIONS AND DIVERGENCES

Three themes describe our experiences with Partnership. They represent the forces that both forge us together and pull us apart. ‘Status Hierarchies and Role Relationships’ describe our work with one another and with the other partners (who are not engaged in self-study). ‘Personal Lives and Professional Lives’ describe the tensions that exist within and between us as we worked together – at first closely and now almost not at all. Political Realities and Cultural Conflict describe institutional and contextual factors that constantly impinge on the first two themes.

Status Hierarchies and Role Relationships. All four of us involved in this self-study are considered to be very powerful and influential within our own spheres of influence - a non-traditional church, a school district, a large research institution, a regional office. Not one of us would be considered ‘weak’ or submissive. And yet, there are still pervasive status hierarchies that impact our work together. Renee was Jane’s thesis advisor and is now Joanne’s thesis advisor. Jane is considered to be one of the most effective and well-respected professional development specialists in the region - a region that serves Joanne’s school district. Sharon is considered to be a very talented graduate student and works very closely with Renee’s department head and associate department head. We could all hurt one another professionally if we chose to do so. The formation of the partnership created new status hierarchies, on top of the existing relationships. These new hierarchies, which surfaced at odd moments, were both positive and threatening, impacting relationships within and across the project as well as the project itself.

As graduate students, Sharon and Joanne’s role in the NTSP partnership, at first glance, seemed to be ‘second tier‘ positions. Sharon was hired as a research assistant and Renee was her boss. Renee made it all too clear that Sharon was on ‘soft money’ and that her assistantship was conditional upon renewed funding. Joanne was a doctoral student working with her thesis director. She was also intimidated by the status positions of the other partners: Renee as Executive Director of the Council on Teacher Education and dissertation advisor, Marty and Jim as Regional Superintendents for whom she had worked. Joanne and Sharon have both acknowledged, however, that they have never been treated as

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unnecessary or unimportant. All opinions and ideas were equally considered and carried weight in decision-making. Renee and Jane, in particular, worked hard to treat them as peers and equals, not in an artificial effort, but as a reflection of how they, Renee and Jane, genuinely saw Joanne and Sharon and their contributions to the partnership. Renee and Jane still struggle with their relationship to one another and Renee’s status with Marty and Jim. The two are men are Jane’s bosses - but not Renee’s. She sees them as peers and political, as well as professional colleagues.

With expansion new status relationships were created. Marianne (Jane’s counterpart) and Chuck (Marty’s and Jim’s counterpart and Marianne’s boss) are a part of the team - and yet not a part of the team. There is still a division between the old members and the new members because there is not yet a sufficiently shared history with the new partners to achieve a new sense of ‘we’ and of trust that the ‘we’ will all pull together to accomplish the myriad NTSP tasks. The addition of new members and the impact on the originating partners’ participation has created ‘cracks’ in the sense of unity and shared vision. What we needed to be able to accomplish the daily work seemed beyond our grasp to create because of the pressures of the daily work

Personal Lives and Professional Lives. All of the co-authors are parents and children of aging parents. All of the co-authors have complex and often demanding jobs. To the individual partners, the partnership had to be worth the personal sacrifice and competing demands on time, personal life and relationships. Partners needed to be able (and willing) to deal with multi-tasking, ambiguity, and both routine and urgent communications. This is an often neglected but crucial aspect of the ways in which one thinks through partnership formation and maintenance. None of us who were members of the original steering committee have been stagnant in our personal or professional lives. We each have professional goals that are larger than the Partnership. As a result, our divergent interests and personal lives pulled us apart.

When confronted with the possibility of losing her research assistantship, Sharon did not wait to find out about funding, she began assuming more university teaching responsibilities. The temporary nature of the position and her move into other areas cost the partnership in terms

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of her expertise and knowledge of the beginnings of the NTSP. While it was possible to replace her in terms of position, it is not ever possible to replace someone in terms of person. Her choice to move into other arenas was a personal choice - and a choice supported by the others. But the decision to leave was not without costs - to the Partnership initially and to herself in the loss of interaction with both the project and the people.

Joanne’s personal life, plus her Superintendents’ refusal to actively support her work with the project, impacted greatly her ability to maintain her previous level of commitment. The Partnership had become more than a dissertation topic for her and she felt personally negligent when she could not make meetings or commit to the ongoing work needed to sustain the NTSP project. Still another job change has meant leaving the state, a reality she is finding more difficult than she had imagined it would be.

Expansion did not take the need to develop new positive personal relationships into account systematically or quickly. Shared experiences, such as attending conferences or working on specific projects helped somewhat for some, but not all, of the new partners. We have not yet completely adjusted to feelings of loss, letting original participants go on to pursue individual goals beyond the partnership while maintaining and redefining their continued participation in the Partnership’s projects and personal relationships. At this point we openly acknowledge that project expansion and the diminishing of some of the original partners’ participation, while necessary, creates even more ‘cracks’ in the sense of unity and shared vision as well as stability of commitment by the ongoing participants. Political Realities and Cultural Conflict Partnerships are not natural to institutions, particularly those institutions that actively engage in competition for resources. While enlightened self interest may impel us to come together around an idea, a funding source, or a project, it is not at all clear that two or more separate institutions can transcend individual interests, particularly when there is an advantage to be gained by disassociation. Jim, Marty, and Chuck are all elected officials and must balance participation with political survival. Renee must teach, conduct research, and participate in her university community - which some people see as conflicting with the Partnership community.

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In our partnership, different cultures (university, public school, regional office) have been a constant challenge to transcend.

While all of our institutions have expressed interest in the partnership concept, individuals have experienced varying degrees of personal support from their institutions. And, without external funding it is not clear how fast that support will erode. While a financial base clearly creates a more secure infrastructure, greater options to plan and experiment over time, and feasible expansion options, the process of identifying and achieving Partnership goals, particularly done in the context of changing personnel, has created a variety of difficulties. Individual partners still struggle to think in terms of the needs and interests that transcend their own, personal or institutional needs, with the knowledge that each of our institutions will (and must) continue to put their own needs first, which makes the partnership ever fragile.

The major issue, woven through each of the previous concerns, is the struggle to keep ourselves ‘partnered.’ There are a variety of complex issues involved: balancing different partners’ roles, interests, and engagement in the project; working to create both joint ‘informational bank accounts’ and ‘emotional bank accounts’ among new partners; and the challenge of losing our identity as a relationally oriented organism and becoming more an institutionally oriented organization. These have all revealed places where our partnership is vulnerable to weakening.

Our self-study has highlighted significant aspects of partnership that contradict the myth of ‘partnership as the ideal solution for improving teacher education.’ Thus, we conclude with a reference to another sense of myth - a sense of ‘not ringing true’ that results when experience contradicts the accepted explanation, wherein the term ‘myth’ carries the connotation of falsehood. Partnerships are ever-changing and are subject to dissolution both as a result of change or lack of change. Partnership is not an entity – it is a set of personal and institutional relationships and the inherent ability we have to inspire and lead each other or to wound each other, all with reasonably pure intentions. Partnership flows out of the uniqueness of institutional cultures and the clashes between them. In the early stages of our partnership, we were not able to talk about this struggle to stay partnered in the midst of these many issues. We have now begun to move from tacit to explicit acknowledgment of the fragility of our partnership. Expansion has caused us, the original partners, to wonder about how to bring the new partners into explicit discussions of

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sustainability. It is not at all clear that individuals can view themselves as being transorganizational and, therefore, able to think in terms of the needs and interests across individuals in the partner institutions. Fledgling partnerships must be prepared to accept the negative as well as the positive aspects of relationships and hierarchies. They must adapt to negotiate the tension between the hierarchies and personalities needed to implement short-run tasks of the partnership’s projects and the egalitarian unity and shared vision needed to sustain the partnership through more difficult seasons. Partnerships are mortal, not immortal, and because they can expire at any time they need care, sustenance, and continual reaffirmation of the importance of their existence.

REFERENCES

Goodlad, JI (1993) School-university partnership and partner schools Educational Policy 7, (1), 24-39

The Holmes Group, (1986) Tomorrow’s Teachers East Lansing, MI: The Holmes Group, Inc

The Holmes Group, (1990) Tomorrow’s Schools East Lansing, MI: The Holmes Group, Inc

The Holmes Group, (1995) Tomorrow’s Schools of Education East Lansing, MI: The Holmes Group, Inc

Intriligator, BA (1992) Establishing interorganizational structures that facilitate successful school partnerships. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, San Francisco, CA

Johnson, M & Kirschner, B (Eds) (1996) The challenge of school/university collaboration Theory into Practice, 35, (3), 205-213

Sirotnik, K & Goodlad, JI (1988) School-University Partnerships in Action: Concepts, Cases, and Concerns New York: Teachers College Press

Su, Z (1991) School-university Partnerships: Ideas and Experiments, 1986-1990 (Occasional Paper No 12) Seattle, WA: Center for Educational Renewal (ERIC Document No 227-917)

Teitel, L (1993) The state role in jump-starting school/university collaboration: A case study Educational Policy, 7, (1), 74-95

Trubowitz, S & Longo, P (1997) How It Works: Inside a School-College Collaboration New York: Teachers College Press

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PART THREE:

SOME SUCCESSFUL OUTCOMES

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Chapter 8

Facilitating teacher and pupil action: Making PSE1

work for African Caribbean children

Tony Sewell

INTRODUCTION

The complexity of African Caribbean underachievement continues to perplex policy makers and teachers. However there has been little evidence of university academics being active agents of change in this area. Research has amounted to collecting data to reveal institutional and teacher racism (Gillborn and Gipps,1996) or playing detective for the government in search of good practice (Blair and Bourne, 1998). Some schools may argue, quite rightly that it was time academics rolled up their sleeves and showed how to do it. Particularly on a wet Friday afternoon with a group of disaffected year 10 pupils. This chapter charts some of the ‘real’ problems involved in making schools and pupils change. It argues that unless you understand the cultures of schools and are prepared to use certain strategies and devices they can be impossible to engage, particularly over race. The chapter ends with a tentative model of necessary requirements for successful intervention. It places pupils at the epicentre of this change where they are empowered to take responsibility for their behaviour and achievement in a context of Social Justice. In a unique partnership between the University of Leeds, African Caribbean children and their teachers we sought to increase Black achievement by the reform of Personal and Social Education. The driving force behind this collaboration is the empowerment of teachers and students, so that they can be active agents in improving their practice and performance. The students not only get a chance to receive skills to improve behaviour, they are given space to therapeutically share their problems and anxieties. Teachers are empowered to take ownership of the programme and adapt the elements according to their teaching style and background. As the 1 Personal and Social Education

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university scholar I not only dug a rich seam of data but also became a facilitator for school improvement.

THE DIFFERENT FACTORS THAT AFFECT ACHIEVEMENT

African Caribbean children, particularly boys, are failing on two levels: exam results and exclusion levels which is six times the national average according to the latest Ofsted Report (1999). There has been some interesting work which has looked at pupil-teacher relationships and uncovered ‘institutionalised’ racisms: Wright (1986), Gillborn and Gipps (1996) and Sewell (1997). However there has been little that looks to the specific pastoral needs of these children and takes on the complex interplay of race, gender, class and identity. There is a need to unpack the parental influence, environmental conditions and lack of social skills that underpin the lives of some of these children. There is a need for teachers not only to challenge their own racisms but practically to find skills to intervene on a number of levels with these students. Many teachers would welcome the opportunity to review their classroom management and curriculum strategies, to develop certain counselling skills to deal with some of the psychosocial problems that these children present, and finally, for the school to review on a systems level how its whole school policies impact on the specific needs of African Caribbean children.

One of the advantages of working outside of school is that you can look at schools objectively. This meant that I could see with more clarity the points of view of both teachers and students. What was often missing in schools was ways in which teachers could effectively challenge or motivate students who might be otherwise disaffected. For some teachers, it was the time and energy while others felt they did not have the expertise to work so closely with African Caribbean students. It was necessary to have a bridge between the needs of the students and teachers who were willing but uncertain. The problem with many other interventions that these schools had undertaken was that they tried to solve this problem by getting outsiders to produce and deliver programmes. This is what I call ‘the hit and run’ intervention, the teachers are not really involved, the students are wooed for a short time but when the passing star is out of sight, we return to business as usual.

The key factor in achievement has got to be ownership by all stakeholders and sustainability of the initiative. There is a need for an

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intervention that recognises the importance of participation of all parties. Therefore it requires the wider school to be informed and to act as evaluators or recipients of training. It is in this context that the skills of the university researcher can be particularly valuable. Schools can draw on research evidence to ensure that they understand the needs of their students and effective ways of helping them. My research skills and knowledge became vital in this collaboration with schools.

I always believed from my own research (Sewell, 1997) that schools were socially very ‘messy’ places where notions of racism interacted with a number of other variables. I was also interested in knowing why some children irrespective of the structural pressures around them still succeeded. One thing I was convinced by was that African Caribbean children had needs that went beyond simple notions of teacher racism and the need for Black role models. However the only way to prove my hunch was to do a small survey by going directly to the children themselves. In order to know what I was changing I had to be sure about the problem and what they perceived to be the real barriers to their learning.

DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVES ON BLACK ACHIEVEMENT: MOTIVATION LEVELS AND PEER GROUPS

Former British television Multicultural Commissioning Editor, Farrukh Dhondy wrote in the Times Educational Supplement (Dhondy, 1999) about the need to look wider than Institutionalised Racism in schools to find the cause of Black underachievement, he said:

The other possibilities need a hard and scientifically passionate examination. It has never been done. Instead we have notions about ‘culture’, ‘role-models’, ‘stereotyping’, ‘positive images’, ‘low-expectations’ and ‘unwitting racism’ floating about which are grasped from the fashion ether and put into play in every circular discussion of the wretched subject…

Doesn’t any institution want to draw up some correlative tables about class conditions, family conditions, details of parenting, cultural pursuits at home, amount of homework done, behaviour in class,

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voluntary attention spans, respectful and polite behaviour, however animated or lively and the great goal of achievement? (p. 9)

It was the reading of this article that made me want to explore the challenge that Mr Dhondy had thrown down. Maybe Black underachievement had little to do with racism, institutional or otherwise. Could it be that Black children were simply not doing enough homework? Could there be other distractions? The best people to ask were the children themselves. How did they view these issues? What was their major barrier to learning? In a national survey of 15 year olds in five secondary schools we wanted to find out what they felt was their biggest barrier to learning in school. The 150 students surveyed overwhelmingly pointed to peer-group pressure as the key factor.

MethodologyThis study was not a long term study nor did it draw on a huge sample of students. However I wanted to get a sense of the real concerns of African Caribbean students from a range of schools - in this case five secondary schools with students of a wide ability range. Three of the schools were inner-city and two were in suburbs, two of the schools were single sex: one boys, one girls. Three schools were in the north of England and two in the south. I and my research assistant conducted the interviews which were recorded and transcribed verbatim. The interviews lasted between 30 to 45 minutes.

To get some sense of commonality we wanted to look at 15 year olds at the beginning of Year 10. This is a key transition point for students both academically and personally. How did we go about choosing these students? We looked at a range of abilities using the previous Year 9 exams as the key source of reference and started the survey at the beginning of their entry into Year 10. In each school I wanted a group of 30 students with an even proportion of boys and girls in each group. There was to be a wide range of academic ability and also at least five of the group had to be at risk of exclusion. The heads of year were allowed to choose the students for us with our guidelines. We did use schools which had a large number of African Caribbean students which is an obvious weakness in the survey because we did not seek the views of those students in a predominantly white context. However, we wanted to

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see the impact of a collective Black youth culture and all the schools used had over 15 per cent African Caribbean intake.

These were structured interviews where students responded verbally to the questions where we asked the students four open questions. Given the sensitive nature of the study, the students were reassured of confidentiality and that they had the freedom to express how they felt. This was a voluntary exercise and the students were told that it was not a self-assessment for school purposes but a research project. The students spoke to us privately and individually as, bearing in mind the subject matter, it was important that they were detached from their peers:

1 How would you describe your relationship with the teachers in this school?

2 What would you describe as the biggest barrier to learning in this school?

3 What are your favourite subjects in school? 4 If there was one thing you could change in the school what

would that be?

In terms of the outcomes of this survey, two things really surprised me. When answering question four, 80% of the students said ‘the toilets’. However, the key finding for me was question two, where 80% of the students pointed to peer group pressure as the biggest barrier to learning. Those students who did cite teacher racism also acknowledged peer grouping as a problem. All participants pointed, in particular, to the way in which peer groups make them feel ‘uncool’ about working hard at school. The significance of this snapshot study is that children from a range of socio-economic backgrounds, genders, schools, regions and abilities were all pointing to the same thing.

After transcription, interviews were line-numbered and coded according to themes which had emerged in the interviews. These themes provided the structure of the data analysis and perhaps a future interventionist framework. Although the majority could be said to come under the general theme of peer-group culture this can be sub-divided into four areas: (1) Conflict management, (2) Social skills, (3) Management of peer-group, (4) Influence of consumer culture.

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Conflict managementMarva: I work hard and I don’t get sucked into any bad groups in school. I don’t blame the teachers everyone knows it ain’t just the teachers – its mainly Black kids with some whites all wanting to act as if they’re the rudest.

Social skillsLesley: I get distracted by my friends they’re always mucking about and I can’t help myself so I join in.

Leroy: My biggest barrier I suppose is like everyone wants me to act bad. So I just do. I can’t help it.

Management of peer-groupJason: I sometimes don’t tell my mates that I’ve done well in my Maths or English in case they dis’ me and call me a boffin.

Michael: ‘ My biggest barrier to learning is my friends they always want me to go out and so I have no time for homework.

Davina: For me it’s like a group thing. Us girls we just go around together and we check boys in our class and mess around. I know we shouldn’t but it’s just the way we are.

Influence of consumer-cultureDanny : It’s an image thing and Black kids are just acting out what they see on television and read in magazines. I know I’ve done it...

In order to triangulate these findings I questioned a number of teachers, in one of the schools, whom African Caribbean pupils nominated as being sympathetic. The rationale behind this was that these teachers, two of whom were Black and one white, would be the least likely to 'blame' the students or even be critical about student cultures in the school. My experience was that they would often talk about teacher racism as a primary cause of problems in school for Black students, but when pressed they all pointed to peer group pressure as the key factor in

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terms of underachievement. The first example comes from a white female Special Educational Needs Co-ordinator (SENCO):

Question: What are the key barriers to achievement for African Caribbean boys?

SENCO: I think that we need to bear in mind that many African Caribbean boys do well here…but the boys that aren’t doing well are very high profile and they tend to dominate the thinking of other African Caribbean boys in school. Because they are such a strong group it can have a detrimental effect on the thinking of the others. Many of these boys have family problems and peer group pressure.

Question: And what about African Caribbean girls? SENCO: I would say the same but not as acute. We have a

group of girls who work really hard and do well. There are girls who come from the same socio-economic background who hang around as a group and if the group is working in a negative or destructive way they can be intimidating to some staff or some students.

One of the Black Learning Mentors working in the school pointed to a relationship with the pastoral issues and underachievement. He stressed class factors, kinship groups and parenting:

Many of the parents are probably working two or three jobs and have four or five children…where the oldest becomes the parent when mum is out working. The child becomes the parent of the house doing all the routine housework and caring for younger siblings. Too many of our kids in this school do not get enough sleep at nights and do not have enough time or the right environment to do homework. I know of a number of children falling asleep in the classroom because they are really full-time parents when they get home. This has a direct impact on their achievement and behaviour in school.

However he also stressed the power of the peer groups and how this led to underachievement:

One of the main problems is their peers, friends, associates. There are more influences now than there were before - so there are a lot

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more things that are going to prevent them from learning …it seems to me that African Caribbean boys of that age want to do more living than studying. And once they get into a pattern it’s difficult to break…

….The other thing about peer pressure for these boys is that they all want to be a ‘big man’ - show the others how many girls they can have and how they can take on the most disciplinarian teacher. They want to show to their friends that nothing can frighten them. These are the things that engage them when they come to school.

These findings are supported by Sewell (1997) in his study on Black

Masculinities. He shows how the most successful students in the school had to carefully negotiate between the demands of the peer or kinship group and the individualistic demands of school. Fig 1 is a diagram based on some of these ideas. It shows schools as an institutional power that often pressures a Black student. It also shows the ‘real’ power that comes from the peer group culture. What is clear is that schools and the research community know very little about this second area and how it is evolving.

Figure 1INSTITUTIONALISED POWER

Teacher racism Undemocratic leadership

High exclusions Individual successColour blind approach

(Thou shalt be an unquestioning conformist student)

African Caribbean Student

PEER-GROUP CULTURE

Challenge authorityBlack consumer culture High self-esteemHyper-masculinityCreative energy / kinship culture

(To work hard at school is to act like a white snob) 119

In response to these issues around peer groups and motivation we piloted a project in two schools both with above national averages for African Caribbean exclusions. They were both secondary schools and there were two factors that made this project a success. Firstly, the project empowered teachers; they were expected to deliver the programme it was not done by outsiders who would later leave. Second it was driven by the specific needs of the children. Thirdly it brought together the teachers and the children with a university researcher. Not only did the researcher have research skills but also a knowledge of the relevant theory and research self-esteem in this particular case.

SELF ESTEEM AND INCLUSION

Race and ‘self-esteem’ are inextricably bound together in the popular imagination. The argument runs that thanks to racism and discrimination, a core of self-doubt lurks in the heart of every Black child and young adult. If only we could raise Black self-esteem, academic and economic achievement would follow. The precise nature of the association between individual self-evaluation and race is often debated . However, most attention has focused on social approval and achievement as important explanatory mechanisms. In America, for example, Cartwright (1950), theorising from a reflected appraisal perspective, argued that Blacks and members of other oppressed or stigmatised groups would make low self-evaluations because they are held in low regard by others. Gerth and Mills (1953) pointed to low social comparison of low status Black people. Causal attribution theory is the basis for a more recent third theory through which people of lower social status are assumed to have fewer opportunities to control their environment, leading to reduced personal efficacy and lower self-esteem Graham (1994).

Psychological studies of Black self-esteem have offered increasingly mixed results, however, in vol. 126 No1 Psychological Bulletin (2000) an African-American is offering what some in the field take to be the final word on the issue. Her findings show that Black children do not have less self-esteem than whites, in fact they often have more. These were the findings of Bernadette Gray-Little, a Professor at the University of North Carolina, who analysed all the literature available on Black self-esteem. The hypothesis of low Black self-esteem has spawned scores of studies

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during more than 50 years. The goal in this study was to synthesise this literature by comparing the average self-esteem levels of Black and White children, adolescents and young adults, and to examine the factors associated with the differences found.

Gray-Little and Hafdhal (2000) conclude that Black self-esteem has not risen over time, as many psychologists had predicted. It has never been low. Whatever racism’s effects - and they are surely huge - this study says low valuation of oneself is simply not among them for Black adolescents. They comment:

This review shows that despite substantial similarity, Black children,adolescents and young adults have higher average self-esteem than their White counterparts. The Black self-esteem advantage is contrary to classical theorizing regarding the relationship between self-esteem and social status. (Gray-Little and Hafdhal, 2000: 40)

Why do Black Americans not have lower self-esteem than White Americans? Why do they often have higher self-esteem? According to Gray-Little and Hafdhal:

We subscribe to the social identity theory explanation….In their quest for positive social identity, Blacks, a highly identifiable social group, emphasize their desirable distinctiveness. Is there support for two key elements of this formulation: that Blacks emphasize the distinctiveness of their racial/ethnic identity more than Whites and that such emphasis is associated with individual self-esteem?…

…The research strongly suggests that race is a more distinctive source of identity for Blacks than for Whites. Judd et al (1995) also found that among Black college students, the level of in-group preference, or ethnocentrism, was higher; that is, Black respondents evaluated in-group characteristics more positively than out-group characteristics, a pattern that was reversed for Whites. (Gray-Little and Hafdhal, 2000: 41)Therefore when it comes to achievement our study supports the

American finding that kinship groups, particularly outside of school, give Black children support and esteem. The problem for those teaching Black children is to help them see that these kinship loyalties and school are not always oppositional and when they are, children need certain skills to navigate ‘school’ and ‘kinship loyalty’. This leads to another conundrum which points to students having high self-esteem yet low academic performance, which is the case for African American and African

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Caribbean students. In order to substantiate these conclusions we would need to have a British self-esteem research project which made ethnic comparisons.

The importance that Black children attribute to peer group and kinship loyalty is a key factor when looking at levels of motivation. There is evidence here of an opposition to schooling, not necessarily based on teacher racism but simply alternative and competitive social identities/interests which many Black children find difficult to manage. Further supportive evidence for this position has come from a report from the National Centre for Social Research which was commissioned by the Department for Education and Employment (DfEE 2000). Instead of looking at children currently at school, they conducted the biggest quantitative survey to date of Black Caribbean men aged 18-30. The men were asked to comment on their experiences of schooling. According to the report:

85 per cent of respondents agreed or agreed strongly with the statement that ‘I had the ability to do better with my school work.’ These respondents cited peer pressure (35 per cent ) and lack of personal motivation (32 per cent) as being the main reasons for not working to the best ability at school. (p.1)

OVERCOMING BARRIERS TO LEARNING PROJECT

Context and aim The complexity of African Caribbean achievement continues to perplex policy makers and teachers. The project recognises a link between pastoral needs of students and their academic/behavioural performance and seeks to meet the specific pastoral needs of these students through a sustained ‘needs’ based programme lasting 10 weeks. We see this not only as an experiment but as a possible model for working with the wider school. There are specific cultural and social issues that African Caribbean children have to deal with but this does not make them ‘special’ or ‘privileged’. It simply makes it easier to unpack these issues as a group. For example the manifestations of white male delinquency often shows itself in truancy and drink. This is not the same for African Caribbean boys who may use different methods. The principle behind the research is not only a sociological one but a strategic one. Put simply, if

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we can get it right with those students who are most challenged by school then we can get it right for everyone.

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The aim of the project is to do the following: Markedly improve the behaviour of those on the project. Draw up a correlation between the pastoral needs of students and

academic/behavioural performance indicators. To be able to deal with Black peer group pressure – ‘How to keep

your ‘cool pose’ and do well in school’. To make wider community links particularly with the parents in the

project. To connect with workers in the school who are doing similar or

related work and have ‘joined-up’ thinking and action. To relate the process and findings of the project to the planing and

work of the wider school.

How the project works We have a sample of 15 children – they are predominantly

children who are underperforming or who are at risk of exclusion. We also include a number of high achieving students so that there is no perception that this is a ‘sink’ or ‘naughty’ group.

We deliver a 10 week Personal and Social Education related programme based on three areas (1) Conflict management, (2) Social skills, (3) How to survive peer group pressure. (4) Development of critical thinking on Black media images.

We know this is the right area because we got the students to fill out a needs analysis form and through our own extensive evaluation during the pilot period of this project.

There is a steering committee made up of a number of staff members.

The programme is delivered by PSE tutors. We just use PSE. We begin the project by giving evaluation sheets to all the subject

teachers of those on the programme. Instructions are attached to the sheet and are sent out again at the end of the project with the hope that all students show a significant improvement on the performance indicators. The students also fill these out at the beginning and end of their programme.

To ensure that the project is rigorous we also monitor a control group of similar students in year 10 who will not get the project in-put. We monitor their performance in the same way as the

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experimental group - through the evaluation sheets sent to all their subject teachers at the beginning and at the end of the project.

In order to evaluate their own practice each session begins with students looking at their own weekly performance on the assessment sheet. They publicly score themselves for each element and the rest of the group can challenge their score out of ten (see figure 3) The student then sees which area they need to improve.

The content of the ten week programmeRationale: Conflict management and social skills exercises are based around the notion that misbehaviour is a cry for help or need. In this context we base the work on four needs: (1), Power, (2), Revenge/justice (3), Attention, (4) Withdrawal. We say to the students that we acknowledge that you have a right to all of these things but these needs can be satisfied in a positive way. Each session has a pack which clearly explains the lesson plan and has lots of engaging exercises for students to complete in response to the stimulus material.

Session 1 Focuses on ‘working out your conflict management handling skills’. Children fill out the evaluation forms that are given their teachers. Session 2-4 Uses an interactive video tape to go through the three week programme called ‘Dealing with anger’. This gives children a number of key rules to get themselves out of conflict. Session 5-6 Uses a film made by Channel 41 called ‘15’. One of the series looks at the difficulty of growing-up from a Black perspective. This is powerful for both boys and girls. Lots of issues arise: teenage pregnancy and the adolescent tension of growing up. Session 6 Focuses on ‘the ideal pupil’: a critical look at some of the statements made by Black students who are doing well. Session 7 Takes a look at a series of images from popular rap magazines. We then ask the children to design an advertising campaign to get young Black children to apply one element of conflict management when relating to other pupils and to teachers. Do another campaign about why it is cool to learn and work hard in school. Session 8 Takes a look at exclusions. Shows the video ‘Fix up’ which was by the author of this chapter. It is Black British kids talking about

1 A mainstream television channel in Britain

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how peer group pressure made them fail in school. This also leads into a discussion about rights and responsibilitiesSession 9 Focuses on ‘Thug Life’. Children listen to an interview with the late rapper Tupac Shukur. They listen to the section where he talks about how he constructed his masculinity around being a Thug but later he regretted it. He talks powerfully about the importance of school and the need to have a life beyond the streets. We also supply teaching and learning materials for the video. All the expletives are taken out of the video, so it becomes child friendly. Session 10 We review the programme for the children. We get them to work on an overview of what they learnt, which can be a general discussion. We then get them to do the same self-evaluation they did at the beginning of the session. This becomes the source of a discussion on the impact of the programme on their behaviour and academic performance.

Figure 2Action Research Sewell Behavioural Scale (Please indicate the performance level of the pupil, by allocating a score of marks out of 10)

Evaluative Measure - Stage One (Beginning)Performance Indicator Allocated Score

1 Voluntary attention span /102 Amount of homework done /103 Interaction with peers /104 Interaction with staff /105 Punctuality /106 Motivation to work /107 Responsibility of action /108 Social skills (e.g. saying please and thank you etc.) /109 Potential to achieve in your subject area /1010 Current level of achievement in your subject area /10

Total Score: /100

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Figure 3 Student Self-evaluation form

Student Name Homework Done

Attention In Class

Punctuality Interaction With Teachers

Interaction With Peers

Week 1Week 2 Week 3Week 4Week 5Week 6Week 7Week 8Week 9Week 10

Scoring (Figure 2 and Figure 3): 1-3: The student is performing below the average for his/her class.

Displaying serious weakness4-6: The student is operating on an average level for the class but there

is still a lot more room for improvement.7-10: The student is performing above average for his/her class. Top

mark for consistency of performance.

PRELIMINARY FINDINGS

The preliminary findings of my case study research reveal that the programme did have a positive effect on behaviour, rates of exclusion and significant improvement on the Sewell Behavioural scale. Those in the control group continued to behave badly, get excluded and scored less well on the behavioural scale. It could be argued that any intervention on this scale would show an improvement. What is significant is that those children, who under any other conditions would have been excluded, stayed out of trouble during the 10 week period.

In terms of the student evaluation of the programme the comments were positive. Many of the children commented that this was the first

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time they were allowed to express their opinions in school and it was also a first when it came to anyone listening.

The pastoral programme was designed to meet the specific needs of African Caribbean children in terms of the content and the style of the sessions. However, it was the use of a psycho-social approach that seems to have been the strength. The children responded well to what can be called the group therapy which ended each session. One of the key recommendations for each of the schools in the programme was that each of the schools should employ a full-time school counsellor. This is a standard feature in many American high schools and is really needed in many British secondary schools.

Perhaps the key finding was that it was possible, within the context of mainstream schooling, to make successful interventions into the lives of African Caribbean children. Personal and Social Education was linked to learning barriers with a measurable assessment framework. It gave teachers the opportunity to own the programme and adapt it to their teaching style. Those teachers who wanted to develop it for a mixed setting saw the advantage of using it as an inclusive model for all children.

A MODEL FOR SCHOOL AND PUPIL CHANGE

Perhaps what was most interesting about this project was not the intervention but the political fall-out that happened around it. I found myself making front page national news in The Observer (August 2000) and The Daily Telegraph (August 2000) on my comments that African Caribbean children found it difficult to manage the pressures of their peer group. It was clear that both Left and Right of the political spectrum would hi-jack these findings to support their own positions. The Right would see me as counter-weight to the evidence that Black children failed because of teacher racism and the Left would dismiss the findings as merely a return to notions of Black pathology and letting ‘teachers off the hook’. Both had missed the fundamental outcomes of the intervention. This was no counter–weight to notions of teacher racism, in fact it challenged the colour-blind approach of the schools to deal with the specific needs of African Caribbean students. Secondly, the schools had created radical spaces for Black students not only to discuss and challenge their own practice but to directly challenge the school.

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Teachers were involved in the assessment process along with the students and it has given individual schools specific data about their own students which can now become the basis for training and policy change.

On a strategic level, secondary schools can be impenetrable institutions where it is difficult to engage management and staff on the importance of making social inclusion really work in their schools. This project was also a ‘Trojan horse’; by engaging the students first I then was able to confront teachers with evidence that many of them needed to change their style and attitudes.

FRAMEWORK FOR PARTNERSHIP AND CHANGE

As a result of this process I have developed a model or framework for partnership and change when working with schools. It is two parts: (1) Identification of barriers; (2) Six recommendations and an eight point framework for university researchers: Barriers

1. Stakeholders not being consulted or engaged: There was a real need to neutralise any cynicism by keeping all the staff informed and making sure that the school has ownership of the intervention;

2. Scepticism: change can be resisted out of cynicism, or pessimism, that change can actually happen. Some teachers argued that African Caribbean children were no different than white working class and so could not understand why they were given ‘special’ treatment. Others argued that any emphasis on Black students is unnecessarily divisive

3. Fear: insecurity about change. In one school there was some resistance from the Head of Personal and Social Education who felt her power-based threatened

4. Competing priorities: many schools still feel that the needs of Black students is a low priority

5. Inflexibility: attachment to a dream rather than admitting you’re wrong and making changes

6. Bureaucracy: unnecessary paper work, particularly for stakeholders

7. Lack of focus

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8. Lack of resources9. Duplication of effort10. No mechanism to evaluate the intervention objectively

Six recommendations and an eight point framework for university researchersRecommendations:

1. Make sure that you have the support of the school leadership2. Develop the ability to shift theory into practice3. Develop networks and join-up the good practice that already

exists4. Popularise the intervention inside and outside of school5. Try to bring about a culture-shift in the school 6 Recognise that change can be facilitated in a variety of ways

Framework Identify the problem: this is where research skills are applicable.

When the problem is analysed correctly, then the change is much easier

The importance of the change-agent: this relates to the leadership question and how the teachers implement the project. Allow for individual teaching style

Find allies and champions within the school: all the heads of year supported the project

Engage or ‘neutralise’ stake-holders: school working party was created

Draw up and implement plans of action which relate to the micro-politics of the school

Mobilise adequate resources: this was mainly achieved by some joined-up practice of support staff

Build positive rewards for achievement: make sure that value is built into it for the people into it for the people who are participating in it so that it matters to them

Embed the change in mainstream practice: so that it does get out to the grassroots

CONCLUSION

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There is good reason for Black parents and the research community to be sceptical about how the education system, and particularly special needs provision, has responded to Black children. The medical model of maladjustment during the sixties and seventies spawned a variety of nurture groups, sanctuary units, support units, transitional classes as a response to troublesome behaviour in schools. Black students were over-represented in them. The assessment processes were clearly underpinned by institutional racism. However I think it is important to keep the baby as we throw out the racist bath-water. The need for nurture, management of self-esteem, improved motivation skills and a youth culture positioned to act out resistance, are clearly factors which could help in formulating helpful responses to African Caribbean underachievement. In the new inclusive context we need to respond to these children without returning to those stigmatised assessment models of the past. There needs to be a new relationship between sociologist and psychologist where the best of the disciplines can be used in a framework of social justice. There is a clear role for the research community in actively engaging schools in meeting these specific needs.

REFERENCES

Blair and Bourne (1998) Making the Difference: Teaching and Learning in Successful Multi-ethnic schools London HMSO

DfEE Ofsted (1999) Raising the attainment of minority ethnic pupils, London Ofsted

DfEE (NCSR October 2000) National Centre for Social Research Report, Black Caribbean Young Men’s Experiences Of Education and Employment Research Brief RR186

Dhondy, F (1999) Feb 19th Institutional Racism Times Educational Supplement p9 London

Gerth, H and Mills, CW (1953) Character and Social structure: The psychology of social institutions, New York Harcourt Brace

Gillborn, D and Gipps,C (1996) Recent Research on the Achievements of Ethnic Minority Pupils, London, Ofsted

Graham, S (1994) Motivation in African Americans Review of Educational Research, 64, 55-117

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Gray-Little, B and Hafdahl, A (2000) Factors influencing Racial comparisons of self-esteem: A Quantitative review in Psychological Bulletin, January 2000, vol 126 number 26-54

The Observer, Sunday August 20 2000 Black youth culture blamed as pupils fail

Phoenix, A (2000): Emergent identities: Masculinities and 11-14 year old boys Research Briefing paper number 17, (Part of the ESRC’s children 5-16 Research Programme) ESRC

Sewell, T (1997) Black Masculinities and Schooling: How Black boys survive Modern schooling Stoke on Trent Trentham Books

The Daily Telegraph Monday August 21 2000 Black culture ‘holding back boys’

Wright, C (1986) School processes – an ethnographic study. In Eggleston, J Dunn, D, Anjel, M and Wright, C (1986) Education for Some: The Education & Vocational Expereinces of 15-18 year old Members of Minority Ethnic Groups Stoke-on- Trent Trentham Books

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Chapter 9

Effective teacher-pupil interaction for closer reading-writing connections

Roy Corden

INTRODUCTION

The British National Literacy Strategy Framework (DfEE, 1998) requires primary children to, 'become increasingly conscious of the writer's intentions' (p.7) and The National Curriculum for English (2000) states that children should, ‘use and adapt the features of a form of writing, drawing on their reading’ (p. 28). Developing children’s ability to reflect upon and refine their work during the drafting process has, for some years, been the focus of my collaborative research with teachers. The work described in this chapter was undertaken as part of a university funded school-partnership programme, initiated by Nottingham Trent University to encourage collaborative research between teachers and tutors. HMI1

(2000) has emphasised the need for children to work on extended pieces of writing and for teachers to support and provide continuous feedback during the drafting process. Teachers involved in the project were concerned that process writing was not a common feature of their practice and that children rarely redrafted written work in response to critical feedback. The teachers were keen to develop an approach to writing, where they could intervene effectively to support children during the compositional stage. It is a feature of the partnership scheme that teachers identify the focus of investigation and development. In this case the teacher already knew me from previous work we had undertaken together so the focus of the project was especially well-matched with my own interest and expertise.

Margaret Meek (1988) has described how children borrow ideas from literature through 'unteachable' lessons. Our aim was to examine how children's written work might be enhanced through 'teachable'

1 HMI (Her Majesty’s Inspectors) and Ofsted (Office for Standards in Education) are both branches of the same national institution which oversees inspection of schools in England and Wales138

lessons, where we drew attention explicitly to aspects of literary texts and where the children explored and evaluated literature through discussion. We hoped that explicitly raising children's awareness of the language and organisational features of texts might help them to pay more attention to structural and stylistic rather than editorial features as they drafted their own written work.

Research approachBrooker & Macpherson (1999) suggest that in collaborative approaches to practitioner research, the quality of the relationship between researcher and practitioner is crucial to the research enterprise. Close links have been formed between the University Education Faculty and its ITT partnership schools2 and the teachers and tutor involved in the project described here, enjoy a trusting working relationship. We wanted our work to be a genuine attempt to understand actions from the actors’ points of view, rather than ‘just a matter of grasping objects from an external standpoint’ (Kerdeman, 1997). We hoped that our experience would be personally emancipatory, but also informative for other professional colleagues. Educational researchers often face the dilemma of adopting a distant research approach with an emphasis on objectivity and reliability, or a grass roots position with a concern for validity and practical application. School-university partnership projects, by their collaborative nature, invariably result in teachers and tutors working closely together at the chalk-face or, as Cordingley, (1999) puts it, being immersed in the swamp.

Theoretical backgroundOur classroom practice was influenced by the work of socio-cultural psychologists and educationalists such as Bruner (1986), Wood (1988) and Barnes (1992). They emphasise the interrelationship between spoken language and learning and claim that discourse can enhance thinking and learning. We found Bruner’s concept of scaffolding particularly useful, since it seemed to complement Vygotsky’s (1986) notion of organised instruction within the learner’s zone of proximal development. The metaphor seemed appropriate to our work because an important feature of scaffolding is its gradual removed as the learner demonstrates increased competence and finally independence. 2 All institutions of initial teacher education (ITT) in England have to work in a formal partnership with the schools in which beginning teachers are placed for their teaching practice. These are the ‘partnership schools’ that are referred to here.

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We also found its interactive nature, with an onus on constant interplay between teachers and learners in the joint completion of tasks, compatible with our view of effective teaching and learning.

Writing workshopsIt is essential to provide children with an opportunity to work on extended pieces of writing, where they can put into practice the knowledge and skills learned during literacy hours3. However, because of the dedicated time allocated to numeracy and literacy, primary schools are finding it difficult to provide a broad curriculum and are struggling to see how it is possible to allocate additional time for extended writing. We considered the writing workshop to be absolutely essential if we were to develop process writing and encourage children to become reflective writers. Writing workshops allow children to engage in authorial activity – to be authors not pupils and to experience writers’ perspectives and readers’ demands. We also wanted to develop a reciprocal scenario, where knowledge gained during literacy hours fed into writing workshops and where work produced in workshops looped back into literacy hours. Our aim was to use literacy hours to examine texts written by adult authors but also to discuss texts being produced by children themselves in writing workshops. We therefore, trialled a timetabling arrangement which would allow such fluidity and writing workshops took place on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons (see figure 1).

Making reading-writing connectionsThe relationship between children's reading and writing has long been recognised (Fox, 1993). Lancia (1997: 471) shows how children, 'spontaneously borrow ideas temporarily as they develop their own writing craft'. Linguists, such as Perera (1987) argue that, through reading and listening to stories, children learn about the language features and organisational aspects of written texts. However, research(Wray, 1994) has illustrated the need for children to develop metacognitive understandings of their own writing processes. Bereiter and Scardamalia (1987) differentiate between what they call ‘knowledge telling’ and ‘knowledge transformation’. The former refers to writing where little planning, drafting or revision occurs, and where the work lacks reflection or on-going evaluation but merely

3 ‘Literacy hours’ are the required dedicated time set aside each day for literacy in all primary schools as part of the National Literacy Strategy. 140

represents existing knowledge or understanding. The latter refers to a more dynamic process of writing where drafting and revision takes

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place and the writer is constantly reflecting on the content, coherence, form and style. Bereiter and Scardamalia (1987) and Fitzgerald, (1987) affirm the notion of 'reflective activity' in successful writers. Such writers, they argue, critically examine and revise their writing decisions, make judgements between competing ideas, and are aware of their potential readers. The research indicates that this kind of reflective activity is uncharacteristic of most primary age children, who tend not to explore options and possibilities, rarely place themselves in the reader's position and limit revisions to surface features. However, Wells, Chang and Maher (1990: 63) propose that, 'by writing, reading and revising, and by discussing one's text with others, one can extend and refine one's knowledge in a conscious and deliberate manner'. They argue that the very act of composing requires children to systematically confront their own knowledge and to organise and shape the content of their work appropriately for the intended purpose and audience. Our experience did not support this view. We found that a major obstacle to reflective thinking and redrafting was children’s inability to assume reader-writer perspectives. Children, initially, were either unable to perceive problems with their texts or were loath to make changes beyond surface features. Our greatest challenge, therefore, was to develop children’s awareness of the necessary discourse between writers and readers and to encourage an eventual internalisation of this dialogue.

The importance of interactive discourseRosenblatt (1989: 154) refers to the interrelationship between reading and writing as 'transactional' rather than 'interactional'. She points out that, 'reading and writing obviously differ in that the writer starts with a blank page and must produce a text, while the reader starts with what is already written and must produce meaning' but suggests that, each conditions and is conditioned by the other. Reading therefore, rather than being a related but separate process that interacts with writing, is actually an integral part of the composition of text, with the writer interacting (as a reader) with the text as it is being produced. Developing children’s ability to interact internally with their texts during composition was a major issue and it became clear that substantial scaffolding would be required.

Response partnersWe found that one of the most successful ways of raising children’s awareness of audience and developing their ability to respond to each

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other’s writing, in a critical constructive way, was through the provision of response partner cards (see figure 2). These cards clarified the roles and responsibilities of both writers and response partners. Having the expectations of writers and readers made explicit helped children to reflect upon and evaluate, not only their writing but also their thinking. According to Bruner (1986) it is this process of identifying in language what we have thought, and then turning around on it and reconsidering it, that allows us to develop our understanding. In the following example, two Year 3 children are responding to another’s early draft of a traditional tale.

1 Richelle But why does the witch keep turning people into toads?2 Chanese Yeah I don’t know why she does that…’cos it doesn’t

tell you.3 Alex Mmm…no it doesn’t does it…I know though.4 Chanese Well we don’t though do we and…and if you weren’t

here.5 Richelle Yeah we wouldn’t know…we wouldn’t be able ask

would we?6 Chanese Perhaps she wants keep ‘em for pets.7 Richelle Witches make things with toads and newts…I reckon

that could be it? 8 Alex Mmm…it could be that or I thought it could be she just

hates everybody…’cos she’s horrible…I think I’ll say that…I might change it to she makes poison…I dunno.

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Richelle (1) and Chanese (2) pose the most obvious question in the reader’s mind and seek some motivation for the witch’s action. Alex (3) accepts that he has not clarified the witch’s motivation for the reader but appears to think that it is acceptable because he, as the writer, knows. This is a typical example of a child failing to position himself as the reader. However, Chanese (4) and Richelle (5) drive home the importance of anticipating reader’s questions and make the crucial point about a writer’s audience being potentially distant. Chanese (6) and Richelle (7) offer a possible explanations and Alex (8) considers their suggestions but now makes clear what was actually in his head that he had not transferred to paper.

Small group discourseThe National Literacy Strategy Framework (1998, p.8) states that the most successful teaching is, 'discursive - characterised by high quality oral work.’ The value of group reading and discussion has been well documented (e.g. Wells, Chang and Maher, 1990). Referring to discussion groups, at key stage 1, Ofsted (1996) states, 'at their best, these groups enabled pupils who had just shared part of a text to consider together common points about the narrative, characterisation and plot' (p. 22), and, at key stage 2, 'questions about details of the text and plot arose from the pupils themselves as well as from the interventions of the teacher' (p. 25). In the following example children have focused on an author’s use of similes.

1 AlexJackson stank like a drain....he does that a lot....he uses a lot of that....whatsits....what are they?

(The children can't remember the word and ask the teacher)2 Shabina I think that's wicked how he does that.3 FayeYeah like Growler with, 'eyes like street lamps'.4 Shabina 'And jaws like an oven door'.

(The children now examine the text for further examples)5 Rachel 'Doors with panels all over like a poacher's buttons'.6 Faye'An iron letterbox as thin as a miser's mouth'....that's brilliant

that is .7 Shabina Yeah you could just say like an iron letterbox with a thin

opening but it wouldn't be anywhere near as good.8 AlexYeah....similes....they're good they are.

(The children notice how the author uses repetition of simile and metaphor to make a point.)

9 Shabina He puts two for some things.

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10 Rachel How do you mean?11 Faye Oh yeah.12 Shabina 'Dreadful weather with snowflakes fighting in the wind'.

'Dreadful weather as hard and bitter as a quarrel'.

Alex (1) identifies the preponderance of simile in the story, but he's not quite sure of the technical term for it. Shabina, Rachel and Faye (2-6) show their appreciation and explore the text for examples to read aloud. Shabina's evaluative comment (7) demonstrates a thorough understanding of the concept and she articulates Alex's feelings (1/8). Shabina (9) then draws the group's attention to another prominent literary device that Garfield has used throughout the story, which is, parallel phrasing and the repetition of metaphor. Shabina later uses this technique in her own writing when she describes a storm at sea.

The waves charged at them like a bull. The wind clawed at them like a cat.The thunder roared at them like a lion. The lightning stabbed at them like a dagger.

Teacher-pupil discourseThe Department for Education and Employment (DfEE, 1998) identifies text level knowledge in terms of text structures, organisation and literary devices. We found that the development of a metalanguage allowed children to order and express their own thoughts and feelings, and to question, explore and interpret the words of others. This was most apparent during teacher-pupil conferences when we were able to make direct references to specific stylistic features of texts and the literary devices used by authors. In the following example, one child (Gareth) is in the process of writing a story involving an animal as one of the main characters. Having written one draft and had evaluations from his response partners, Gareth has asked the teacher for a conference to discuss his work. During whole class discussion, the teacher has drawn attention to story openings and to different methods of direct, action and dialogue description techniques. During the conference Gareth clearly transfers the knowledge and understanding acquired from his analysis of texts to his own writing.

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Conference(The teacher reads the work) Teacher This is really good....what do you think....are you pleased

with it?Gareth Yeah it's O.K. but I think it's a bit short....I need more in it.Teacher Which parts are you most pleased with?Gareth The opening....how I've got the character right at the

beginning....described him....a direct description right at the start.

Teacher Yes....it gets the reader's attention straight away.....sort of grabs hold of you.

The opening of Gareth's story.Grymer was short, round like a ball and had bandy legs that seemed to bend under his weight. He wore a scowl at all times and smoked a foul smelling pipe.

Conference (continued)Gareth And then you can tell what he's like....from how he spits and

he never says anything nice....and he's horrible to Patch....this bit here.

Gareth's storyHe spit all the time and never had a nice word to say to anyone. When he could not steal enough he had to work in the market. He carried big pieces of meat on his back. That's why he always smelled so rotten. There was a small black dog with a white patch over one eye who used to live around the market. People called him Patch and no one owned him but everyone used to give him bits of meat. Grymer pretended to give Patch some meat but he would snatch it away at the last minute and Patch would go mad and start crying. The more Patch cried the more Grymer laughed.

Conference (continued)Teacher I don't think you need to change the beginning....maybe....

what about adding to the direct and action description by having him talking to someone....you know....some dialogue description like Leon Garfield does in Fair's Fair with Jackson and Growler and Roald Dahl does with Mr and Mrs Twit.

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Gareth Mmm....you mean like showing he's horrible by saying something really nasty....mmm....like he calls her an old hag....yeah.

Following the discussion, Gareth develops his story and uses dialogue description and colloquial language to develop Grymer's character. The discussion then focuses on Gareth's use of a particular literary device he has ‘borrowed’ from the author Leon Garfield.

Gareth's story'I'll get you,' said Grymer, not in words but with his staring eyes and horrible mouth.'Just you try,' said Patch, not in words but with the way he growled.

Conference (continued)Teacher I like this....not in words but with his staring eyes and

horrible mouth.Gareth It's like....how the dog...talks to Jackson.Teacher Growler....yes.Gareth Yeah....cos animals don't really talk....like it says....not in

words but....what it does....by what it does....by what it looks like.

Teacher Through its actions and expressions you mean?Gareth Yeah....so you can believe it more than if it was an animal

what talked.Teacher And you've used that for Grymer as well.Gareth Yeah don't you think that's good....I do.

Bereiter and Scardamalia (1987) suggest that a notable feature of compositional maturity is the way that children are able to talk about their texts in a way that indicates knowledge transformation. This transformation, they argue, manifests itself in children's ability to reflect on choices that have been made in a piece of writing, either about content, or aspects of style beyond the surface features of handwriting, punctuation and spelling. Gareth clearly shows his explicit awareness of literary devices and his ability to use them consciously and appropriately when composing his own text.

What we learned about reading-writing connections

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Research has suggested that primary age children are able to make intertextual links, or to borrow ideas and plots from literature, but are less likely to transfer more subtle stylistic elements into their own writing (Bereiter and Scardamalia, 1987; Fitzgerald, 1987; Cairney, 1990). However, evidence, from partnership projects, indicates that a critical evaluation of literature and an examination of the literary devices, used by adult authors, can help children to develop their own writing skills and become more reflective writers. With direction from teachers: providing models, demonstrating and drawing attention to the features of texts, and through focused group discussion, children can begin to develop their awareness of how texts are constructed.

One of the most striking features to emerge from our work was the way children gradually developed a metalanguage and were able to use it effectively when discussing their own texts. This enabled them to identify, illuminate and focus on issues that were relevant to their writing. They were able to discuss their own work, relate it to models they had experienced, and discuss the appropriateness of using particular literary devices to extend and enhance their own work. The use of specific literary terms helped the children to clarify their thoughts, identify issues and engage in lucid, focused discussion with each other and with the teacher. Through quality interactive discourse with teachers and peers, children analysed texts proficiently and according to relevant criteria. They were then able to integrate the stylistic and organisational features of these texts into their own repertoire and to use them successfully in their own writing.

The mutual benefits of partnership research projectsSchool-university partnerships bring a personal and institutional ‘payoff’. They benefit individual teachers, tutors, children, schools and universities. Collaborative classroom research helps to bridge a harmful psychological gulf, which can develop between school teachers and university education tutors. Teachers can be seen by tutors to be over- concerned with technicalities whilst tutors may be seen by teachers to be interested only in theories and out of touch with the everyday demands of a classroom. Partnership work can break down such prejudices and help teachers and tutors move beyond potentially harmful polarised perspectives. Primary teaching requires technical skills and practical acumen but effective pedagogy must also be based on research evidence and sound theoretical principles. Teachers benefit from being updated on developments in learning theory and empirical research. For tutors, nothing impresses trainees

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and teachers attending professional development courses more than tutors illustrating theoretical points with examples from current teaching experience and practice in schools. In the partnership work described here we were able to relate Vygotskian theory to the primary classroom and apply scaffolding techniques to support children in their writing. For more detail see Corden (2000). We were able to trial a time-tabling arrangement and to evaluate the potential of coordinated literacy hours and writing workshops. The professional development of school staff will ensue and a whole school approach to writing will be initiated. Findings from the work will be disseminated locally, through Local Education Authority publications and, through journal articles and conference papers, nationally and internationally. Local partnership programmes can therefore, influence a wide audience and have the potential to impact on national policy and practice.

REFERENCES

Barnes, D (1992) The role of talk in learning. In K Norman (ed) Thinking Voices: the work of the National Oracy Project London: Hodder & Stoughton

Bereiter, C and Scardamalia, M (1987) The Psychology of Written Composition Hilldale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum

Brooker, R & Macpherson, I (1999) Communicating the processes and outcomes of practitioner research: an opportunity for self-indulgence or a serious professional responsibility? Educational Action Research, 7 (2) 207-20

Bruner, J (1986) Actual Minds, Possible World Harvard University Press

Cairney, T (1990) Intertextuality: infectious echoes from the past The Reading Teacher 43, March 1990, 478-484

Corden, R (2000) Literacy and Learning through Talk: Strategies for the Primary Classroom Buckingham: Open University

Cordingley, P (1999) Constructing and critiquing reflective practice, Educational Action Research, 7 (2) 183-190

DFEE (1998) The National Literacy Strategy Framework for Teaching Sudbury, Suffolk

DFEE (2000) The National Curriculum for English in England London, HMSO/QCA

Fitzgerald, J (1987) Research on revision in writing Review of Educational Research 57 (4) 481-506

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Fox, C (1993) At the Very Edge of the Forest: The influence of Literature on Storytelling by Children London: Cassell

HMI (2000) Writing: could do better, HMI discussion paper, DfEEKerderman, D (1997) The prosaic and the professional: interpretation

in Gadamer’s hermeneutics Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Education Research Association, Chicago, Illinois

Lancia, P (1997) Literary borrowing: the effects of literature on children's writing The Reading Teacher, 50 (6) 470-475

Meek, M (1988) How Texts Teach What Readers Learn Stroud, Thimble Press

Ofsted (1996) The Teaching of Reading in 45 Inner London Primary Schools, London: Ofsted Publications

Perera, K (1987) Understanding Language NAAE/NATE PublicationsRosenblatt, LM (1989) Writing and reading: the transactional theory.

In JM Mason (ed) Reading and Writing Connections Boston: Allyn & Bacon

Vygotsky, L (1986) Thought and Language (new edition) Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press

Wells, G, Chang, G, & Maher, A (1990) Creating classroom communities of literature thinkers. In S Sharan (ed) Cooperative Learning New York: Praeger

Wray, D (1994) Literacy and Awareness, London: Hodder and Stoughton

Wood, D (1988) How Children Think and Learn Oxford: Blackwell

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Chapter 10

Zone Hockey for physically disabled children: The creation of a research-based game

Douglas C Williamson

INTRODUCTION

In July 2000 the English Hockey Association (EHA) agreed to a proposal that it endorse a new game, Zone Hockey, for youngsters with disabilities. This proposal was presented by Sue Sutton, one of EHA’s regional development officers, but it had been prepared in partnership by her, Ken Black of the Youth Sport Trust (YST) and myself. This was the culmination of a year’s action research in which a number of partners had contributed at all stages to the invention of a successful and enjoyable game which fills a gap in current special needs PE provision in schools. Research has produced the new sport of Zone Hockey.

In this chapter it is argued that the processes of collaborative action research has ensured that this new sport has been developed quickly and that it has already been taken up enthusiastically by children, teachers and promoters of hockey as a game. The process of development began in response to a particular teaching and learning challenge in sport for physically disabled children, so it is significant that the final form of the game meets that need. However the success and status of the game also results from the processes of research which produced it: collaborative action research in partnership across institutions. These processes are different from those underpinning projects of ‘research and development,’ or ‘curriculum development’. Unlike them it does not assume a single linear process of problem recognition followed by problem solving, field-testing and dissemination. The Zone Hockey research is better understood as a number of spirals in which successive turns are responsive to new partners as well as to previous ones. The research depended on collaboration and partnerships between myself (in Nottingham Trent University) and other people in a range of roles (teachers, children, hockey development officers, umpires, academic critical friends) in a

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range of institutions (thirty two schools, the English Hockey Association, the Youth Sport Trust, and Nottingham Trent University.)

Researchers in the UK are urged by policy makers to work in partnership with users and others. In relation to Education Faculties in universities the rhetoric is one in which partnership is something new and which universities need to learn. It is also focused on ITE (Initial Teacher Education) to the exclusion of other areas of partnership between schools and universities. (For instance, the overview by Kirk (1997) carries both these messages.)

While the Teacher Training Agency (TTA) and the Department for Education and Employment (DfEE) apparently accept that a wide variety of possible partnerships exist, they act differently. Neither of them discuss a range of models. Both of them appear to work from the assumption that a partnership is formed at will, and, using the language of management they assume that written contracts, agreements, and feedback are crucial to making it work. Here is TTA advice on ‘key principles’ for what a university/school partnership should have:

Key Principles Prior consultation with teachers, parents, governors A negotiated partnership agreement setting out roles and

responsibilities Transfer of resources… Transparent and equitable arrangements…for the use of

resources.Here is a recent DfEE summary of their guidance on partnerships between schools, Partnerships in Practice (www.dfee.gov.uk):

Summary: Chapter 3 - Managing your partnership: Co-ordinator or management board. The experiences of existing partnerships underline the importance of effective project management. Progress against the aims and objectives of the partnership needs to be monitored. The partnership should be flexible enough to respond to changing circumstances and adapt if necessary. There is no single right way to manage a partnership. The adopted approach may be influenced by various factors, including the number of partners, their proximity to each other, whether they have facilities to communicate by electronic means (e-mail or video conferencing), whether the partnership has a single focus or covers a number of curriculum areas.This chapter shows that these models are much too narrow, even

misleading. It focuses on researching in partnership. It presents the

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development of Zone Hockey as a case study of collaboration and partnership in one research process. It shows that the successful outcome of the research depended on drawing on a network of long-term professional relationships. Therefore this chapter contributes to the debate about the nature, uses and reasons for success (or failure) of partnerships within educational research. It shows that this form of partnership is different from most of those currently promoted by policy makers and their advisors which ignore such factors, apparently assuming that partnerships can be set up without the kind of time, trouble and continuing flexibility it takes to keep long-term relationships going.

The chapter begins by describing the research: (a) explaining the particular teaching and learning challenge in sport for physically disabled children which provided the impetus for the research, (b) outlining the action-research cycles which followed and (c) reporting the impact it has already had. In the next section I go on to reflect, briefly, on my role as the lead researcher and on the processes of collaborative partnership which contributed to the success of the project. Finally, conclusions are drawn about what made for success in this collaborative action research partnership, and why it matters.

ZONE-HOCKEY: AN ACTION RESEARCH PROJECT

The action research cycle is usually understood as some variation on the basic theme of a cycle of planning, action, observation and reflection (Griffiths and Davies, 1995). The first stage in any new action research project is to identify a problem which needs to be resolved: ‘identifying what to act on’ (Kemmis and McTaggart, 1988) or ‘finding a starting point’ (Altrichter et al., 1993). In the case of the Zone Hockey project this crystalised one May evening in 1999. The occasion was the annual ‘Mini-games’ at Stoke Mandeville. Physically disabled children and their teachers from across the country come together for a weekend of games and sports competitions. The following is taken from a taped conversation with my critical friend (Mo Griffiths, who is in the same ‘Social Justice research cluster’ at the university). I was describing what had got the research started. This excerpt from the transcript is included to give a flavour of the research process:

Goalball is a game for the blind participants at the Paralympics. You have to wear blindfolds so that means everyone is in the same class. At the Mini-Games at Stoke Mandeville they had the option

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of doing Table Cricket [a game that had been recently developed: see Williamson, 2000] or they could go and do Goalball. Whilst the organisers were doing Goalball with these severely physically handicapped youngsters, or partially physically handicapped youngsters my mind thought this is not right! In other words they’re doing a game designed for another disability with this disability group. Well when I put my six factors of adaptation over that [Described in Williamson, 1990; Smith and Williamson, 1993], to me it was just gobbledygook. There’s was no dignity; and professionally I couldn’t see it.

Now there’s a tradition down there, all the teachers - once the kids are in bed on the Friday and Saturday night - they get their bottles of wine and their crisps and their cheese, and they all go into the little anteroom – within earshot of the pupils’ dorms - and they have a kind of annual reunion. So I go in there and I say, ‘Right, I reckon we can do better than Goalball!’ And Anne Craddock (a past Special Needs inspector) a teacher from Birmingham – is practical like me – mentioned to me, ‘Our kids are mad on Uni-Hoc wheelchair hockey.’ So I put two and two together. What you want I said is a new invasion game. So we talked it over that night - with other teachers contributing - over wine and cheese, and thought, ‘Yeah, right! Go for it! By this time next year, give ourselves twelve months, see what we can do!’The national curriculum requires children to play different

categories of game, including an ‘invasion game’, like hockey. There already exists a hitting and fielding/ running game (i.e. Table Cricket), and a net and ball game (i.e. PolyBat) for youngsters with the more severe disabilities. There are also versions of hockey for physically disabled children, but none of them have proved very suitable. For instance, formal Wheelchair Hockey depends on having a large number of expensive wheelchairs – and also a number of players all of a similar ability level. Also there are plenty of ambulant children with impairments for whom wheelchair games are inappropriate, anyway. Moreover, some earlier evaluation research I had carried out with physically handicapped youngsters had pointed up the importance to them of having a game which would allow children with different levels of physical impairment to play together. Equally important, for it to succeed is that it should be a game which was recognised by the relevant governing body, in this case the English Hockey Association.

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The next stage of the action research is to plan, act and reflect. As Griffiths and Tann (1991) point out, this is a nested cycle which includes (at least) not only both reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action (Schon, 1983) but also longer-term reflections using theoretical materials. Some of these cycles overlap in time, but they are presented here, for simplicity, as if they were successive cycles. This simplification will also allow the effects of the collaboration on the overall direction of the research to be demonstrated. However it should be borne in mind that research discussions were being held with critical friends at the University throughout the process. This influenced what happened in the individual research cycles, but could be said to be a cycle in itself.

The first cycle took place directly as a result of the wine and cheese evening described above. As a result of the conversation, there were more discussions with Anne Craddock and the children she taught at Wilson Stuart School in Birmingham, who were already playing ‘Electric Wheelchair Uni-Hoc’. She also supplied a video of the youngsters playing the game informally in the playground. This was very helpful because I was able to sit down and study it. The question of levels of physical ability is always a vexed one, but I am well placed to deal with this because I have had experience of classification at Paralympic level disabled sport. (Also see Williamson, 1997). Thus after some reflection, and having tossed it around in my head since May, I decided upon ‘zoning’ to solve the twin challenges of ‘the use of space’ and ‘contrasting abilities’. By July the ideas were sufficiently advanced to initiate the first proposals and find out those who would be interested in the piloting phase. The thirty-two schools who had been involved in the Table Cricket competitions were invited to respond if they wished to be involved. Many of the teachers in these schools were already known to me and had worked with me on other projects. All these schools were circulated. With the guidelines sent out they were asked to try out this new game format and offered a series of specific proposals and queries to comment on. For instance they were asked about the zones. Should there be three up and down the court or horizontal zones more like a netball court? They were asked to reply by the end of the summer term. Sixteen schools responded with comments and ideas. Meanwhile Anne Craddock had begun networking with Sue Sutton of the EHA, the West Midlands Development Officer and the national co-ordinator for Special Needs Hockey. This contact proved to be very significant for the development of the game. For my part, I was

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already networking about this new proposal with Ken Black of the Youth Sport Trust. The YST is responsible for distributing sports equipment to schools in the form of their BT TOP SPORT ‘sportsbags’. This contact, too, was highly significant as by October the YST had arranged a meeting with myself to discuss the possibility of the new game being adopted.

The second cycle was much like the first, but with a smaller set of participants. A second letter regarding classification of the participants with different kinds and levels of disability was sent out to the sixteen schools that had responded to the first letter. Of these sixteen, ten schools replied by the Christmas deadline. It was encouraging to get this many responses. The timetable was tight, especially with Christmas intervening, so this level of response indicated considerable interest on the part of the schools. On the other hand, it was fortunate that it had been possible to draw on as many as thirty-two schools for the first sweep and that these were part of an informal network of people known to each other. Otherwise it is doubtful whether a useful number of responses would have been forthcoming. In fact, some of those who did not reply were still interested, as the next cycle showed.

The third cycle was particularly interesting and also significant in terms of the development of the game. In a discussion about the project with my university critical friend, it was suggested that some modest resources could be found to facilitate the development. I then thought of conducting a pilot competition, with the help of the resources, to test the proposals gathered from the schools. Discussions between Anne Craddock, Sue Sutton and myself resulted in a definite proposal to organise a pilot competition in Birmingham in February. It was hosted by Anne Craddock from the Wilson Stuart School. Three local schools took part plus one from Manchester. The teacher from one of these had been one of the original sixteen but had not responded to the second letter because of pressures of time. The competition constituted a stage of the ‘plan, act, observe, reflect’ cycle. It was possible to try out the game as a real team competition. However it was more than this. All the cycles so far had been, essentially, ‘reflection-on-action’ by indviduals. But at the February meeting there was also ‘reflection-in-action’ as a collaborative process between different sectors. It was so important that the game be acceptable to the relevant governing body, the English Hockey Association, that not only Sue Sutton, but also two qualified Midland League Hockey Umpires were invited to participate. A proficient adult user of sports wheelchairs was also there, as were some critical

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friends from the university. Ken Black from the Youth Sport Trust had also been invited. He has considerable experience and knowledge about ‘what works on the ground’. The children and teachers also took a lively interest in how the game should be designed. As one of the children replied when asked by my critical friend who attended to assist with the data gathering, how it differed from ordinary Uni-Hoc wheelchair hockey, they said, ‘We invented it’!

The fourth cycle is more difficult to describe, because at this stage the collaborative nature of the process began to result in there being overlapping cycles with different participants taking lead roles. We realised the original intention of developing an invasion game meeting the needs for dignity and fun for different levels of physical disability, in time for the May Mini-Games; and this occasion is describable as a fourth cycle. With the support of the EHA and the Disability Sport Trust (who host the Mini Games) Zone Hockey was on offer in May 2000. The EHA umpires took part again, as did Sue Sutton. They were working with children and teachers who had never come across the game before and within ten minutes it was working – and needed very little umpiring. The decisions taken in February regarding the zoning, the relative size of zones, the proportions for a full-size pitch, the classification of disability were all validated. One new rule was formulated allowing teachers on the pitch to show the children where they could and couldn’t go. The research was complete. But like all research it opened up new ideas and even developments at a tangent. The different developments, including the tangential ones, could each be termed ‘the fourth cycle’. In effect there were at least three ‘fourth cycles’ going on simultaneously and learning from each other.

Once the news of our new game had started to spread one group even used it before we did our first pilot trial! The British Wheelchair Sports Foundation used the game during their junior sports camp in February and gave very positive feedback on the results. This was a success, and it appears that another fourth cycle may have occurred. It is unlikely that this will turn into further action research in any formal sense, of course, unless there are researchers in the Foundation who are interested in taking it forward. The Foundation is going to adopt the game in future junior sports competitions.

Another direction has been in the direction of mainstream schools. The discussions between Sue Sutton and myself have been crucial here, but in this case I have not provided the initial lead. Sue Sutton has observed that the zoning in itself is useful in improving the small-scale hockey games suited to primary children currently using Uni-

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Hoc sticks. Children keeping in zones cannot all ‘chase the ball’. Instead they learn to use the wings, and work in teams, and develop skills in passing the ball, for instance. Ken Black is interested in mainstream schools for a different reason. The Youth Sport Trust has noticed that teachers seem reluctant to use the wooden hockey sticks the YST currently supply in their BT TOP SPORT sportsbags. It seems teachers worry lest children hit each other with them. Thus the proposed plastic sticks suitable for Zone Hockey provide one answer at the same time as being part of a game which helps fulfil National Curriculum requirements. Given Sue Sutton’s enthusiastic reports about the success of zoning in mainstream situations I suggested the possibility of using the special needs version as a mainstream ‘foundation’ game. Also I had long held the view that the popular recreational game of Uni-Hoc had been a wasted opportunity for mainstream hockey development. It was therefore considered likely that this could also be acceptable to English Hockey Association should they consider the need of a ‘foundation’ game for hockey which would make primary children ‘turn on’ to hockey in a safer context. The result could be that Special Needs had generated a game for mainstream! This is a fruitful area for further development and for future cycles of action research. At the time of writing the English Hockey Board are actively considering the proposal and the signs are that it will be successful

The outcomes of the research to date have exceeded the aims identified at the beginning of the process: designing an ‘invasion game’ which would allow children with different levels of physical impairment to play together with dignity, and for it to be a game which was recognised by the relevant governing body. The research process has indeed produced this – and it has also produced a game, which is fun and lets the children develop a range of sports skills. Furthermore, it helps teachers meet their National Curriculum responsibilities and helps bodies such as EHA and YTS in their mission of promoting youth sport for all in England. The process has also provided professional development for all concerned: the researcher, the teachers and the sports officials. Dissemination of the research is not proving a problem. The collaborative processes and the care taken to work in partnership has had the spin-off that all participants become committed to the game. For instance, Sue Sutton writing in the June edition of Hockey Sport (published by the EHA) says (p.13):

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Play was hectic, exciting, challenging and on occasions highly charged. It is a game that has a future, should have a future. Hockey continues to have a future when walking hand in hand with these youngsters, in this environment. … The passion and spirit of the youngsters who took part was breathtaking. Have a go and see for yourselves!

Thus many youngsters who previously did not have the opportunity to participate in a ‘near contact’ dynamic invasion sport - with all the accompanying aspects of excitement, chance and personal commitment – now have that avenue of opportunity.

REFLECTIONS ON RESEARCH AND PARTNERSHIP IN THIS PROJECT

The importance of my being a university lecturer and researcherFirstly, the project is dependent on a sustained programme of research - especially the previous two projects which resulted in Polybat and Table Cricket (Williamson, 2000). It is also dependent on a sustained programme of scholarship involving key aspects in this particular area of physical education provision. Crucially this includes:

The Principles of Adaptive Games which I have developed over 30 years of involvement with sport for the physically disabled and informally tested by my students (both in ITE and INSET) (Williamson, 1990, Smith and Williamson, 1993)

The classification of disabilities for sports purposes (Williamson, 1997)

Secondly, the project is dependent on being part of a university research culture in which action research is encouraged. The nature of action research is such that it can be carried out as part of being a lecturer. The research culture has been supportive also in the involvement of a critical friend from the social justice research grouping. Thirdly the project’s ability to use and enthuse partners among teachers is a direct result of twenty years of teaching at NTU and establishing a network of varied contacts.

None of this could happen so easily in some other institutional arrangement. A partnership needs difference among the partners, and particular strengths among them need to be used. There are particular strengths associated with being an academic at a university and equally there are strengths associated with being directly involved in provision for youngsters. It would have been harder for a teacher or sports development officer to develop the game so well through

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research and to have the same credibility. Likewise, as an academic I would have found it a challenge to establish credibility with the initiative without practical input and contacts of the teachers and the sports development officers.

The importance of collaboration and partnershipThe whole process depended on partnership of different kinds – and on the ability to enable individuals within these partnerships to collaborate with each other in all the stages of action-research: planning, action, observation and reflection.

Consider how the description of the research has shown perspectives and input from people in all the following roles to have been significant in the success of the game: Teachers, Children, the English Hockey Association, the Youth Sport Trust, British Wheel Chair Sports Foundation and university academics.

Note how partnership worked here: there was no attempt to stick to some pre-set plan, set in stone from the beginning. Rather, when a particular institution became involved it was able to contribute to the direction of the process without overturning the original aims. The process of the four cycles demonstrate how research through partnership can give a range of benefits which normally would not occur, and which were not thought of when the process began.

Also note how the collaboration occurred through comfortable human processes resulting from long term relationships. The Mini Games wine and cheese evening is one of these. The relationships are being nurtured and used all the same time. Similarly the request for help with developing the new game are not experienced as impositions by researchers. Rather they are joint enterprises and they to both nurture and use existing relationships. It is clear that the continuing contact between myself and Ken Black of the YST about games and kit for the Sportsbags meant that the distinctive perspectives he brings to the game contributed to the kinds of planning, action, observation and reflection possible for it to be developed on a higher status far beyond that of a prototype format. The same is true of the involvement of EHA in the person of Sue Sutton. This contact was a new one. An organic network must have room for new members – and if it is robust it will have developed ways of including them. Yet mention must also be made of the way the whole process has been facilitated by contemporary technology! Thus emails and the power of computers in developing support materials have enabled the different cycles to be created and close contacts maintained which would not have been

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possible a few years ago. Members could be involved without the pressures of trying to hold geographically challenging meetings!

CONCLUSIONS

Underpinning themes have appeared from reflecting on the experiences and process of this research. A number of factors appear to have facilitated its success. They may be summarised as follows:

The sum of the individuals and resources is greater than the individual parts.

In many phases it generates its own pace and momentum which saves the participant’s energy.

There tends to develop a high degree of commitment on behalf of the individuals so lapses in motivation rarely happen and less stress is created.

Because it is a team approach if one party has a particular commitment at a particular time they project can afford a lapse of input because the other can continue on appropriate activities.

Despite this apparent relaxed and paced approach there is still the need for someone to take the lead and make some critical decisions – in consultation with others.

It is interesting to compare these conclusions with the advice from TTA and DfEE at the start of the chapter. They seem to assume that tight managerial control is essential. Or to interpret the website advice another way, the DfEE could be said to be using a mangerial tone but actually advocating the kind of organic processes described in this chapter. Finally, it is also interesting to compare what has been achieved in this small-scale, qualitative, collaborative action research with what Malcolm Wicks, Lifelong Learning Minister assumed could be achieved from such research. From the DfEE website (accessed August, 2000):

Research can become more relevant and accessible thanks to the establishment of the new Centre for evidence informed policy and practice in education (EPPI-Centre) Malcolm Wicks announced today. Speaking in London at the launch of EPPI - Centre Mr Wicks said: ‘In February David Blunkett called for an improvement in relations between Government and the research community to help determine what works and why. Although £65 million is spent on educational research, partly because of the lack

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of long-term investment, much of this tends to be small scale and qualitative. EPPI-Centre will contribute to changing this. Policy and practice must be driven by sound and practical research - what works? What doesn’t? That’s the challenge for researchers’.

The challenge can be – is – met by research such as this.

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REFERENCES

Altrichter, H, Posch, P and Somekh, B (1993) Teachers Investigate their Work: An introduction to methods of action research

Kemmis, S and McTaggart, R (1988) (eds) The Action Research Planner (3rd edition)

Kirk, G (1997) ‘Partnership: the sharing of Cultures?’ Keynote address Annual conference for Teacher Education in Europe, Glasgow; www.leeds.ac.uk/educal/documents (accessed 17.8.00)

Griffiths, M and Davies, C (1995) In Fairness to Children David Fulton

Griffiths, M and Tann, S (1991) ‘Ripples in the reflection’, in P Lomax (ed), Managing Better Schools and Colleges: an action research approach, Clevedon: Multilingual Matters

Sutton, S (2000) Zone Hockey Hockey Sport June, 12-13Smith, R. & Williamson, D. C. (1993) Practical Innovations for Nine

Adapted Activities, Games and Sports. Nottingham Trent University. UK: Second Edition.

Williamson, D. 'The Principles of Classification in Competitive Sport for Participants with Disabilities.' Palaestra 13, 2 1997: 44-48.

Williamson, D. (2000) ‘Polybat and Table Cricket: From Adaptations to Sport Status’ The British Journal Of Teaching and Physical Education, 31 (1)

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