Abstract
It is a pleasure once again to introduce a diverse collection of articles from across the world, including relative newcomers Romania and Italy. The articles we receive reflect the growing diversity of approaches to whole-school change, including issues which were previously neglected: improvement rooted in community links and in curriculum development.
Stan Tucker and Dave Trotman (Newman University, England) and Horatiu Rusu and Daniel Mara (Lucian Blaga University, Romania) have been collaborating in a regional school improvement project which emphasises collegiality and participation. As they remind us, education reform depends on a deep understanding of the situation and shared values. Education in Romania is less centralised than in the Communist era, but increasingly subject to pressures from the European Union and World Bank, which undermine democracy and negotiation by imposing change from the outside. This overcrowds the curriculum, reinforces older styles of teaching and makes it difficult to develop a ‘humanizing pedagogy’ that ‘values students’ background, culture and life experiences’. The project is continuing to develop narratives of childhood, creativity and critical thinking and, in terms of governance, to build a ‘school commune’ linking schools to community in conditions of extreme poverty.
The theme of family involvement is continued in the next two articles. A literature review about community links by Yune Tran (George Fox University, USA) shows how parental interest and involvement can go some way to alleviating the impact of poverty. It is crucially important for young people growing up in demoralising circumstances that their parents value their achievement. Unfortunately, there are barriers to be overcome, and some of these are explored in this article: the bureaucratic nature of schools, ethnic gaps between teachers and students, teachers’ lack of knowledge on how to involve families, different understandings and patterns of literacy and teachers’ underestimation of the difficulties some parents feel in communicating effectively with schools or even understanding the school’s report cards.
Gillian Inglis (University of Strathclyde, Scotland) focuses particularly on children’s involvement in parental consultation evenings. Scotland places a positive emphasis on the rights of the child, including the right to consultation, but despite the interest expressed by children, their capacities as active agents are underutilised. Despite the policy statement that ‘young people are citizens of today, not citizens in waiting’, they are only marginally involved in evaluating their own progress and achievement. Consequently, they tend to receive thinned down messages from their parents, and little directly from teachers. There are real obstacles to be overcome, including parents’ fears that teachers will hold back from speaking critically. This close study of three primary schools sheds an interesting light on communications between teachers and families.
Another example of communication problems is presented by Claire Drummond and Elizabeth Abery (Flinders University, Australia) and concerns the capacity of schools to encourage healthy eating. In theory, primary schools should be in a good position to provide education in nutrition and influence eating behaviours, but there are barriers. These include a resistance from parents and children to buy healthier options, the assumption that buying food from the canteen is a treat or reward for children and treats don’t need to be healthy and also the marketing pressures for unhealthy foods which overwhelm more local efforts to educate and influence. The authors point also to some of the management tensions. First, canteen managers often feel separate from the school, and poorly informed about policies; equally, the principal may feel he or she has ‘other priorities … it isn’t my role’. In this context, it is easy for canteen managers to feel that the greatest pressure on them is accountability for takings and financial viability. Fortunately, the authors are able to point out that sales tend to recover after an initial dip.
Samuel Kwon, Peter Wardrip and Louis Gomez (Concordia University, University of Pittsburgh and University of California, Los Angeles, USA) present a convincing argument that promoting interdisciplinary projects is not only a valuable curriculum initiative but also serves the purpose of capacity building. Interdisciplinary projects, involving collaboration between different subject specialists, and sometimes supported by external partners, provide contexts for shared planning, resource design and evaluation. Specifically, forms of project-based learning and collaborative design are characterised by learning essential knowledge and skills through an extended inquiry process, complex and authentic questions and working towards a final product or presentation. A particularly strong model is based on contexts where sustained collaboration is possible, such as schools-within-schools or ‘small learning communities’ where, for example, four subject teachers work consistently with 100 students. Based on two successful projects and an unsuccessful one, the authors emphasise the importance of reaching agreement on significant learning outcomes.
The next two articles also break new ground for this journal in their focus on mathematics. There is a strong international emphasis on the importance of improving attainment in mathematics, but little discussion, at whole-school levels, about the process of doing so and the obstacles to be overcome. Andrea Caputo and Valentina Rastelli (Istituto nazionale per la valutazione del sistema educativo di istruzione e di formazione (INVALSI), Italy) bring school improvement and the mathematics curriculum together. Better school improvement occurs where there is a careful analysis of the context, and where there are conscious efforts to develop capacity in terms of collaboration and team learning, inquiry and dialogue. Conversely, coercing staff into inauthentic collaborative processes tends to backfire and teachers who are unconvinced begin to regard teamwork as time-wasting. Central to genuine collaboration is the shared desire to improve student achievement, and the recognition that pedagogic problems need to be overcome to advance students’ cognitive powers.
Across the Atlantic, Maureen Finlayson (Cape Breton University, Canada) concentrates on the need to overcome maths anxiety. Her research locates this primarily as a ‘response, over time, to stress in the maths classroom’, especially where tests are given under time pressure. Such stress leads to avoidance strategies among learners, and consequently, diminishing competence and negative attitudes. Traditional teaching methods tend to emphasise memorisation rather than active concept-based learning. They expose learners by demanding answers in front of the class, mental arithmetic without the aid of writing tools and quick recall. The risk of giving the wrong answer undermines self-confidence. In particular, if teachers are not confident in maths, they tend to be dogmatic and accept only one way to do a calculation. Constructivist learning on the other hand emphasises a process of constructing meaning and knowledge, built on prior knowledge. It involves working out strategies for solving problems, trying them out, seeing if they lead to solutions and checking to see if your answers make sense. Students learn to develop models of a situation, to engage in problem-solving as cognitive experiments and feel less helpless if they share their thinking and listen to one another.
Finally, Ian Clark (University of Washington, USA) draws our attention to the concept of ‘formative learning environments’, a school ethos which supports students’ capability to succeed despite personal vulnerabilities and adversities. This is a critical issue since poverty and racism so easily leads to demoralisation and fatalism. Pedagogical aspects include the modelling of learning strategies, so that intellectual curiosity is stimulated through social participation, and teachers showing a deep interest in student ideas. In a dialogic environment which is thoughtful and respectful, there is no shame in a wrong answer, as students collectively build knowledge by testing out their hypotheses. This complements and strengthens the work being undertaken internationally on formative assessment techniques, by recognising that a certain climate is needed if it is not to get stuck in formal rituals.
Finally, this issue includes three book reviews. Hanneke Jones reviews Living on the Edge: Rethinking Poverty, Class and Schooling by John Smyth and myself. This is followed by an introduction to two fascinating and thoughtful books, Changing Practices, Changing Education by an Australian team led by Stephen Kemmis, and Kathryn Riley’s Leadership of Place: Stories from Schools in the US, UK and South Africa. All of these books contribute new ways of thinking about school development in complex environments.
I am hoping to focus one of the later issues of 2014 on education and inequality, particularly the struggle of teachers and school leaders to conceptualise and respond to the growing challenges of family poverty. I am happy to comment on outline proposals or early drafts of articles for this issue, particularly those which offer new perspectives and experiences.