Evaluación del riesgo

Quite late in this study, I encountered reflexive6' discussion of the "complex, unordered recursive, contradictory and suppressive she experienced in her small-scale investigation of joint custody arrangements following separation or divorce. Her account seemed to echo closely my own experiences of researching secondary school teaching. Thus:

In one sense my research followed the well-worn path of literature review, interviewing, analysis of data and writing up. But those stages were neither discrete nor neatly completed prior to my moving onto the next stage, Instead I was engaged in a much more recursive, spiralling process, where, for example, the literature provided a starting point for writing and for interviewing, yet the interviews permitted a interrogation of the literature and re-conceptualising what I had thought and written, so that all aspects of the study continued to inform, question and review each

It is important to make this point as otherwise it might appear that the study smoothly from conception to execution and conclusion. Far from it. With the benefit of what Robert Pirsig calls "twenty-twenty hindsight", it has been possible to write an edited version of the research process that logically and neatly links literature review, methodology, data presentation and analysis. However, to use a field-archaeology analogy the reality of the research process for me resembled much more the excavation and tentative re-assembly of one piece of stylised medieval saltglaze pottery from a mix of shards in the knowledge that some pieces may be missing or buried more deeply than I had reached, and others belong to quite different pots. In this sense, I want here to avoid writing a sanitised methodological discussion that treats the study as "a 'technology', as simply a set of methods, skills and procedures applied to a defined research Instead, I want to:

...

try to make explicit the intentions and procedural principles that we put into the research project, the findings of which we present here. The reader will thus be able to reproduce in the reading of the texts the work of both construction and comprehension, of which they are the

I began this study in 1995 with the idea that I wanted to investigate secondary teachers7 professional development and the ways in which 'curriculum managers' contributed to this. I was clear at the outset that I wanted to capture "the teacher's perspective" as Sullivan puts it and to research the topical areas of practice they considered important and were attempting to develop. Having been a secondary teacher myself, I was confident in my ability to empathise

Usher, R. Textuality and reflexivity in educational research. In R. Usher and D. Scott (Eds.). Understanding educational research. London: Routledge,

61

Opie, op. 1994. Ibid., p. 69.

Usher, R. A critique of the neglected epistemological assumptions of educational research. In Usher and Scott, op. 1996, p. 9.

with the research participants and I assumed that the occupational detail of what I was told and invited to observe would be reasonably familiar to me. I was also quite happy at that stage to consider using some of my new work colleagues' suggestions of suitable, phenomenological research instruments that seemed to offer the enticing prospect (for a part-time researcher) of the straightforward gathering and analysis of experience data. As I became caught up in the "recursive, spiralling process", however, the vital importance of 'multiple embedded contexts'

-

individual, workgroup, institutional, systemic, historical, political and cultural - became increasingly apparent. These teachers' and curriculum leaders' work was informed both by local norms, traditions of secondary school teaching practice and the requirements of centralised reforms in curriculum, teaching and management all of which were in some respects highly specific to New Zealand secondary schooling. As such, the nuances were unfamiliar to me but I clearly needed to discover more about them if I was to understand the subtleties of what I was being told and invited to observe. As a recent immigrant I was disadvantaged inasmuch as I had not myself lived these traditions and was not aware of or attuned to their significance for teachers' conceptualisation of their practice. In contrast, I was advantaged by the fact that, as a consequence, I was unlikely to take for granted, unquestioningly, these aspects of quotidian practice and policy development. In due course, it became clear to me that if I were adequately to represent and theorise the rich complexities of teachers' practice, from their perspective, I would need to adopt an approach that united the contemporary, historical and cultural strands of schooling. Achieving this would locate teachers' own voices (values, positions, experiences and modes of analysis) within the broader discursive practices of secondary school teaching in New Zealand since the 1940s.

Having conducted only one or two early interviews, I realised that to do justice to the experiences of the teachers involved, I would need to gather and analyse data in a manner that would articulate what Olsen calls the enduring of teaching" and the "tacit dimension of but within a topical context of educational policy reform. In addition, given that I wanted to focus on the "particularity of individual situations", I would need to examine carefully the way in which I constructed representations of practice that purported to depict the idiosyncracies of local workgroup context and the voices of the research participants. As Opie points out, gathering, analysing and representing data in this manner is a difficult juggling act:

. . .

with its reference to the multiplicity of often contradictory sites, voices and ideologies

to which researchers have access and which are themselves embedded in the subjectivity of the researcher; of the experience of analysis of the data itself where a close reading of the texts or transcripts of interviews may often result in a modification and re-evaluation of what initially appeared to be a clear analytic framework; and of writing where not only

64

Bourdieu, P. Understanding. Theory, Culture Society, 1996, p. 18.

much of the detail and particularity of individual situations which have contributed to the interpretation are suppressed, but where the choice of one interpretation suppresses or marginalizes

Analysing Educational Policy in Context

A number of educational researchers have attempted the analysis of contemporary practice within its lived political, cultural and historical contexts. Common to almost all the examples discussed below is a consideration of the relationship between knowledge and power: how historical practices and their constituent power relations constitute contemporary social arenas within which certain forms of language, knowledge and practice are conceptualised, articulated, allowed, preferred, and regulated, while others are marginalised, silenced or

Policy scholarship

Grace, in his study of school leadership, makes a sharp distinction between what he calls the 'policy science' and the 'policy scholarship' Applied to the domain of educational leadership, the former is concerned with the identification and generalisation for use in educational settings of specific leadership behaviours through supposedly value free and objective research. The latter, in direct contrast, seeks actively to understand the practice of leadership in its historical context on the basis that "many contemporary historical problems or crises in education are, in themselves, the surface manifestations of deeper historical, structural and ideological contradictions in education In advocating the importance of policy scholarship, Grace argues that what is "relevant here is a commitment to locate the matter under investigation in its historical, theoretical, cultural and socio-political setting and a commitment to integrate these wider relational features with contemporary fieldwork data. In this sense policy scholarship is used as an essay in wider and deeper In sum, Grace chooses to eschew a reductionist, predictive science of individual leadership behaviour in favour of a complex, historically grounded critical analysis of how, in his case, English headteachers engage with enduring moral, ethical and practical dilemmas amidst a shifting, interventionist policy terrain.

Olson, J. Understanding teaching. Buckingham, Open University Press, 1992, p. 24.

66

Op. 1994, pp. 60-61.

Foucault, M. Power and knowledge: selected interviews and other writings. New York: Pantheon, 1980, chapter six.

Grace, G. School leadership. Beyond education management. An essay in policy scholarship. London: Falmer Press, 1995, pp. 1-4. In a later paper, Grace observes that policy scholarship is simply "shorthand" for critical policy scholarship. See Grace, G. Critical policy scholarship: reflections on the integrity of knowledge and research. In G. Shacklock and J. (Eds.). Being in critical educational and social research. London: Falmer Press,

69 _{Grace, op. 1995, p.} 3.

In a subsequent paper, elaborates his understanding and commitment to a critical scholarship approach based on the work of Fay in the Fay suggests that a critical social science must (a) uncover the historically embedded nature of flaws in the social order; (b) develop theories which demonstrate the structural contradictions that underpin these flaws; (c) produce theories that speak to and in the language and experiences of the social actors involved; and (d) be illuminative and educative for the social actors involved rather than manipulative of Grace points out that contemporary scholarly work and research are severely constrained both through the political control of research agendas by fundholders; the intensification of the formulation, conduct and reporting of research projects; and, the "commodification of research Hence there is a pressing need for researchers to be reflexive about their work. Reflexivity, for Grace, is part of the process of evaluating the integrity of the research, intended to ensure that it has "soundness of methodology and analysis, probity of scholarship and comprehensiveness of Such research, he claims, is more likely to be both critical and humane. For example, in a refreshingly candid, reflexive commentary on his "oppositional position" to the educational reforms in New Zealand, written soon after his appointment as Chairperson of the Department of Education at Victoria University, Grace concedes that his own scholarship may not have met all of criteria:

In reflexive relation to Fay's (1975) four imperatives for critical social science, cited earlier, the most serious omission is 'must be grounded in the self-understanding of the actors'. In fact, because of the constraints of time, the analysis was conducted largely from documentary sources and at a distance from those directly involved in or affected by the reform process. In other words, the research process was not participative and the 'voice' of those involved in the reforms was not an integral part of the analysis unless it had been mediated in written form. This must be regarded as a weakness in work which claims to be critical and

Policy ethnography

Using a distinct but complementary approach to Grace, Smyth and Shacklock have recently analysed the regulative effects for teachers of the accreditation processes they must go through to secure 'Advanced Skills Teacher' (AST) status in Australia. The authors identify four competing discourses of teaching "on and about" the AST initiative which they call 'official',

Op. 1998.

Fay, B. Social theory andpoliticalpractice. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1975.

73 Grace, op. 1998, p. 206. Ibid., pp. 202-203. Ibid., p. 209. 76 Ibid., p. 219.

'preferred', 'resistant' and Their case study sets out to examine "the clash" between these. Moreover, the authors "consider it important that teachers have the opportunity to access discourses about their work which counter the constraints by drawing upon language and conceptual apparatuses different to those that see teaching primarily as economic

To facilitate this, they set out to "develop a conversation between the macro-forces shaping teachers' work and the specific micro-forces as lived and experienced by teachers in their everyday lives as Indeed, the axiology of the study is explicitly and avowedly political in that the authors "believe there is a pressing need for accounts of what is happening to teaching that enable teachers to reclaim the of In attempting to meld together topical, localised teachers' accounts with a critical analysis of the macro forces of structural adjustment as these shaped, in this instance, the development of the AST initiative, the authors describe their work as an exercise in "policy ethnography". On the basis that policy development is always "a contested struggle over 'representation' and 'exclusion' of particular viewpoints and sets of interests culminating in temporary truces or uneasy they wanted to explore:

...

what happened when authorities sought to impose a (well-meaning) policy on teachers from which they had been excluded during formulation. We were also interested in the response of teachers as they came to understand what this policy meant for them in the context of their work, and how much they were prepared to tolerate a redefinition of their

Policy sociology

Smyth and Shacklock draw on Ball's studies of "policy sociology" in which he construes educational reform as a complex discursive struggle for ascendancy. For Ball, this complexity demands that we conceptualise more clearly what 'policy' is if we are to study its constituent processes, contexts and He makes a basic and important distinction between policy as text and policy as discourse. Policy texts, he argues, are "interventions in practice". Although they encourage certain readings and reactions, texts vary in the degree to which they intentionally allow for local interpretation and adaptation. Those who produce policy documents cannot directly control how policy as text is read, interpreted and responded to locally because

Smyth, J. and Shacklock, G. Remaking teaching. Ideology, policy andpractice. London: Routledge, 1998, p. 10. Ibid., p. 197. Ibid., p. 6. Ibid., p. 27. 81 Ibid., p. 29. Ibid.

Ball, S. Education reform. A critical andpost-structural approach. Buckingham, U K : Open University Press, 1994. (See also, Ball, 1990, below.)

"there may often be key mediators of policy in any setting who are relied on by others to relate policy to context or to There are, then, complex processes at work in policy mediation and, given its relevance to this study, Ball's description of these is worth quoting at length:

Solutions to the problems posed by policy texts will be localized and should be expected to display ad hocery and messiness. Responses must be 'creative'; but I use the term carefully here and in a specific sense. Given constraints, circumstances and practicalities, the translation of the crude, abstract simplicities of policy texts into interactive and sustainable practices of some sort involves productive thought, invention and adaptation. Policies do not normally tell you what to do, they create circumstances in which the range of options available in deciding what to do are narrowed or changed, or particular goals or outcomes are set. A response must still be put together, constructed in context, offset against other expectations. All of this involves creative social action, not robotic activity. Thus, the enactment of texts relies on things like commitment, understanding, capability, resources, practical limitations, cooperation and (importantly) intertextual compatibility. Furthermore, sometimes when we focus analytically on one policy or one text we forget that other policies and texts are in circulation, and the enactment of one may inhibit or contradict or influence the possibility of enactment of

The mediation of policy texts in localised contexts is, evidently, a social process that hinges on language and communication. To reflect this Ball articulates a conception of policy as discourse wherein policy texts circulate in social (or educational) spaces as one 'voice' in a cacophony of competing claims for power and influence in the shaping of practice. Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault, Ball notes that discourses are "about what can be said, and thought, but also about who can speak, when, where and with what authority. Discourses embody meaning and social relationships, they constitute both subjectivity and power Discourses, then, articulate, shape and constrain what may be thought, said and done. Educational policies as textual interventions are attempts to change the ways in which teachers, or curriculum leaders, or students, as "subjects" think, act and interact. Thus, argues Ball, ideally, we also need to study 'policy trajectories7

, ie their discursive effects over time in what he calls the contexts of 'influence', 'policy text production', 'practice', 'outcomes7

and 'political

Ibid., p. 17.

Ibid., pp. 18-19.

Ball, S. Politics andpolicy making in education. Explorations in policy sociology. London: Routledge, 1990, p. 17.

Policy archaeology

Also drawing liberally on a Foucauldian framework, Scheurich takes the

application of this policy 'trajectory' notion a stage further in his postmodernist "policy Scheurich criticises what he calls traditional positivist and newer postpositivist approaches to policy studies. Both, he argues, take for the construction of social problems (real or symbolic) as if they were 'medical diseases' for which solutions, in the form of policy, are proposed. Yet for Seurich, both approaches fail "to question or critique the 'natural' of social Scheurich asks us to consider why and how is it, for example, that certain aspects of social or educational practice become identified and named as problems in the first place, and others not? This becomes the first of his four "arenas of study or focus", namely "the study of the social construction of specific education and social The second, and most abstract, he calls the "social regularities in which he seeks to identify the tacit networks of and "rules of formation" that constitute the historically specific conditions which allow a of education problems and policy options to be identified. Third, is the policy solution arena that similarly "involves the study of how the range of possible policy choices is shaped by the grid of social And, fourth, is a critical examination of the social that constitute policy studies itself as a field of practice. In order to demonstrate the practicability of the approach, Scheurich then applies each of the stages to some real educational 'problems', for example, the development of

health, welfare and social services as a policy solution to the perceived problem of underachievement groups' of poor, ethnic minority and parent children.

Critical discourse analysis

However, Luke claims that "many educational analyses have difficulty showing how large-scale social discourses are systematically (or for that matter unsystematically) manifest in everyday talk and writing in local In his review of the literature on critical discourse analysis, Luke argues that "every moment is caught up in with text of some

Texts for Luke are forms of in use". (meanings, statements, words and concepts) infuses social institutions such as schools, the media and government. It is

that constitutes discourse. The of discourses makes possible different ways of and acting for individuals: "texts position and construct individuals, making available

Scheurich, J. Research method in the postmodern. London: Falmer, 1997, chapter five. Ibid., p. 96.

Ibid., p. 97.

Ibid., p. 101.

92

Luke, A. Text and discourse in education: an introduction to critical discourse analysis. Review of

In document Anuario de la Facultad de Ciencias Económicas del Rosario, Vol 12, 2017 (número completo) (página 81-85)