El aporte critico desde la Economía Experimental:

This chapter theorises the approach taken in the study to analysing teachers' work within the contexts of policy and practice. The narrower focus for the empirical phase of the study is explicated. Following this, I review theoretical and empirical studies of secondary teachers' work that have been conducted in New Zealand since the Tomorrow Schools reforms were implemented in 1989. The problem of gaining access to teachers' thinking about their work and the location of this within wider historical, political and occupational discourses is discussed and several possible policy analysis approaches described. From this, the criteria within which the study was developed are enumerated, as are some of the tensions and issues encountered during the fieldwork and analysis of the data. Finally, the difficulties of plausibly representing teachers' work are discussed together with the implications of this for data selection, presentation and commentary.

INTRODUCTION

In the previous chapter, a review of the discursive practices of secondary schooling from the 1940s to the 1990s revealed the manner in which enduring popular images of teaching, curriculum and its management or leadership evolved from the 1960s. These were, in part, a response to a crisis of secondary school teacher supply and quality during the post-war economic boom. Images and traditions became embedded through their articulation, adoption and promotion at several levels of the schooling system. They contribute to the production and maintenance of a hegemonic conceptualisation of how the ideal or 'expert' teacher or curriculum leader thinks and behaves, conceptualisations to which all practitioners are assumed to aspire. Thus, they serve a similar purpose to concept of educational 'myths

y .'

A review of selected print media reports during the period of this study suggested that in the mid-1990s these popular images or traditions of teaching, curriculum and management remained highly influential among politicians, teachers' representatives, bureaucrats and sections of the community. Notwithstanding, since the mid the broadly consensual liberal-progressive tradition had been interrupted and contested by counter-discourses. These had their origins in the Labour curriculum, qualifications and assessment reviews convened by Marshal1 and Lange as the Labour Ministers of Education. With a subtly different reading these same discourses came to emphasise, under National and Smith, the management of individual teacher accountability for improved student outcomes measured against benchmark curriculum standards in the interests of the national economy. In this regard, the analysis of popular and professional print media texts has limitations. It cannot reveal (a) which

1

C. Introduction. In W. Renwick. Moving targets. Six essays on educationalpolicy. Wellington: NZCER, 1986, p. xv.

among the competing discourses individual teachers and curriculum leaders ally themselves with; (b) the extent to which traditions of teaching, curriculum and its leadership are shared by groups of teachers or curriculum leaders within particular schools; nor, (c) the extent to which they endeavour to develop them in their day-to-day routines. In attempting to articulate a more precise focus for the empirical phase of this study, then, two areas of enquiry were of particular interest:

a) To what extent and how do practising teachers define 'expertness' and work towards it? b) To what extent and how does the curriculum leader contribute to the collective development

of teacher 'expertness'?

It is important at the outset to clarify the distinction between the terms 'expertise' and 'expertness', given that I have adopted the more arcane 'expertness' for this study. As I indicated in chapter two, 'expertise' appears routinely in discourses that relate to the 'professionalisation' and 'professionalism' of teaching. According to the Oxford English the words have a number of similar but not identical usages. 'Expertise' is defined as "expert opinion or knowledge, often obtained through the action of submitting a matter to, and its consideration by, This I see as an abstract, normative and evaluative conceptualisation, in this case, of teaching or curriculum leadership. 'Expertness' is defined as "skill derived from practice; readiness, This I see as the gradual and personal realisation through day-to day practice of the craft or art of teaching and curriculum leadership. 'Expertise' on this interpretation may be determined from the periphery or even from outside the realm of practice of a particular group of social actors. In contrast, 'expertness' is constituted within. Moreover, its purpose is 'pragmatic' in the sense that "knowledge must not be separated from practical affairs, that it its only justification from its contribution to the resolution of human To use an anthropological distinction, 'expertise' is 'experience-distant', while 'expertness' is 'experience-near'?

An experience-near concept is, roughly, one that someone a patient, a subject, in our case an informant - might himself naturally and effortlessly use to define what he or his fellows see, feel, think, imagine, and so on, and which he would readily understand when similarly applied by others. An experience-distant concept is one that specialists of one sort or another - an analyst, an experimenter, an ethnographer, even a priest or and ideologist - employ to forward their scientific, philosophical, or practical

second edn., 1989. Ibid., p. 567. Ibid.

Hammersley, M. The dilemma of qualitative method Herbert and the Chicago tradition. London: Routledge, 1989, p. 45.

Heinz Kohut, cited in Geertz, C. Local knowledge. Further essays in interpretive anthropology. New York: Fontana, 1983, p. 57.

Alternatively, using an occupational framework, 'expertness' might connote the "indeterminacy" aspects of professional teachers7

practice "that are dependent on tacit knowledge. They are not susceptible to codification and representation as explicit rules or recipesn_{.' 'Expertise' in contrast, would be similar to "technicality" which "characterizes} knowledge and action which may be so represented and reproduced via explicit

Thus in choosing to focus on 'expertness7

rather than 'expertise', I am making a case for exploring the concepts or "cultural that teachers and curriculum leaders themselves might "naturally and effortlessly use [to] see, feel, think, imagine" and conduct their practice. Connelly and Clandinin call these "teachers' professional knowledge landscapes"." I shall return to the methodological implications of this stance later in the chapter. For now, it is sufficient to ask what, if anything, existing research in New Zealand tells us about teaching "from the native's point of

Notwithstanding the scope and complexities of secondary school teaching as a social field, little research has been conducted in this area in New Zealand or on the practice of teaching in particular institutional and policy contexts, and even less on the management or leadership of curriculum areas by individuals or groups of teachers within secondary schools. Yet, it seems evident from the two previous chapters that, as a 'site of struggle7

, workgroups themselves are key arenas where teachers, as social actors, breathe life into normative historical, political and cultural models of curriculum through their day to day practices. It is, therefore, to this local context (in effect, a nexus of the 'teaching7

, 'curriculum' and 'management' themes discussed in chapter two) that we might usefully turn in order to uncover how teachers collectively respond to official curriculum, pedagogy and assessment policy, and the extent to which they seek to embody idealised traditions of teachers' work and 'expertness' in their lived practice.

In this chapter, I discuss previous research in the area of secondary school teaching, curriculum and management in New Zealand - both in order to document what has been studied and how, and also to "identify the structured silences in the research performed so On the basis of this, I then consider the theoretical orientation chosen for this study and the criteria that informed the 'research design'. Finally, I discuss key elements of the research design itself.

Delamont, S. and Atkinson, P. Fighting familiarity. Essays on education and ethnography. Cresskill, New Jersey: Hampton Press, 1995, p. 96.

Ibid.

Carspecken, P. Critical ethnography in educational research. London: Routledge, 1996, p. 39.

Connelly, M. and Clandinin, J. Teacher education - a question of teacher knowledge. In A. Scott and J. Freeman-Moir (Eds.). Tomorrow teachers. International and criticalperspectives on teacher education. Christchurch; University of Canterbury Press, 2000,

12

op. 1983, chapter three.

13

Smyth, J., Hattam, R. and Shacklock, G. Pursuing a research thesis in education. Adelaide: Flinders Institute for the Study of Teaching, 1997, p. 19.