El capital social y los modelos con preferencias no estándar:

In this chapter, three questions were addressed:

1. What are the forms and origins of the various contemporary discourses of teaching, curriculum and management that exist within the New Zealand secondary school system?

2. What effects have changes in central curriculum, pedagogy and assessment policy had on teachers' work?

3. What is the role of the Head of Department in contemporary secondary schools in New Zealand?

Although idiosyncratic in terms of their historical, educational and cultural contexts, developments in New Zealand have clear parallels with the management, curriculum and teaching issues discussed in chapter two.

In the first part of this chapter, an analysis of professional, bureaucratic and popular print media sources from 1995-1997 (i.e. the years during which this study was undertaken) revealed a loose political and professional agreement around the ends of contemporary

Op. 1986, p. 77. NZQA, op. 1994, p. 49. NZPPTA, op. 1994, p. 20.

At the time of this study, 'professional standards' for those in positions of responsibility had yet to be introduced in New Zealand and as a result there was no evidence of official or scholarly interest in the work of heads of department per se (compare this with the situation in England from 1996 (chapter two,

Bloor, D. and R. The workloads of secondary school teachers. A national survey. Final report. Massey University, Educational Research and Development Centre, 1995, December, p. 13.

299

Op. 1983.

curriculum and assessment reform in secondary education. The durability of this accord was periodically tested by differences between government and teachers' representatives on a range of salary, workload and conditions of service issues the means).

In attempting to discover why such unlikely bedfellows as a leftist trade union, NZPPTA, and a new-right, National party government should appear to share a similar educational agenda with regard to curriculum and assessment reform, a brief review of the development of secondary schooling since the watershed Thomas Report was attempted. This showed that for much of the post-war period a broad, non-partisan consensus existed in major aspects of curriculum, pedagogy and assessment or credentialling. During these decades, idealised images of liberal-progressive secondary school teaching, curriculum and management took shape and were promoted as practicable and ethical solutions to the problems of delivering mass, compulsory schooling in an unstable socio-economic environment.

From the late 1960s PPTA, bureaucrats and politicians collaborated on a protracted review of the aims, objectives and practices of secondary education in response to demographic and labour market changes, issues of teacher supply and quality, and to increased student retention rates in the senior school. Changing emphases in curriculum, assessment and credentialling coincided with the articulation of a new discourse of a 'preferred teacher'; one who was both educated and trained, empathetic to the needs of an older and less compliant student population, and committed to the development of enquiry-based learning. This image of the ideal teacher as "adroit guide to the enquiry epitomised a normative desire to modernise secondary schooling and its constituent processes of teaching, curriculum and management from a traditional subject-orientation to one of 'guidance'. Moreover, throughout the post-war period, the ideal type pedagogue was consistently portrayed as someone who worked closely with immediate colleagues as a member of a collaborative workgroup and of a like-minded profession. Yet, against this warm rhetoric of 'extended should be set the realities of increasing teacher workload and stress that appear in surveys of the profession in the 1980s and 1990s.

Over time, as secondary schools grew in size and complexity, the role of the 'preferred' also became more clearly articulated, although in the case of the latter, by the the predominant emphasis in both procedural manuals, Department of Education surveys and professional development was on the burgeoning administrative and managerial aspects of the role, rather than its 'leading professional' or 'teacher development' domains. Indeed, such was the extent of bureaucratisation of school organisation that, in addition to the historical 'Head of Department' role, secondary schools were entitled, on the basis of their student roll size, to

NZPPTA, op. 1969, p. 3 1.

302

Hoyle, E. and R. Innovation and the teacher, E203 Units 29 and 30. Milton Keynes, UK: Open University Press, 1976.

appoint a hierarchy of other 'positions of responsibility' both for subject and, less frequently, pastoral and administrative responsibilities. Because of this it probably makes more sense to talk more generally in terms of all those with 'curriculum leadership' responsibilities, not just

In the consensual constructions of 'teacher' and 'curriculum leader' slowly unravelled as the legacy of a 'back to basics' prompted a new discourse (language and practices) of teacher quality, accountability and performance management within a shifting politics of curriculum, assessment and qualifications. By the mid 1990s it was clear that despite broad agreement on the need for reform, there were differences, both ideological and operational, between government and teachers' representatives. These differences were about how the reforms should proceed, and who should control the pace issues) and direction (i.e. professional autonomy) of schooling change.

Having examined in some detail the historical, political and cultural context of secondary teaching since the in the next chapter, I want first to define a clearer focus for the empirical phase of this study and then to consider the evidence available to us from analyses of secondary teachers' work in the period since the educational reforms of the late 1980s. I then attempt to locate this study as a whole within an appropriate research tradition and, on the basis of this, analyse key components of the research design.