MÓDULO FORMATIVO 3: PRÓTESIS COMPLETAS REMOVIBLES DE RESINA Nivel:

Ruling texts formed textual hubs and it was within the textual hubs that sequences of actions were organised and coordinated through the emergent social relations. For example, Alice talked about how she and her year level colleagues used the Line of Sight document and in doing so described how this text structured their social activity of dialogue and decision making about curriculum planning. For example, Alice stated,

We’ve gone to KWeb [education sector intranet] again and printed off all the sheets that Cath Ed has put together or someone has put together that shows the whole curriculum on one page [Line of Sight document]. We get four different highlighters and once we’ve covered it, and obviously you cover it more than once, this is our focus in Term 1 and this is our focus in Term 2 with a different colour and so on. So at the end of the year we can go we’ve done our best this year, but basically we’ve covered (Line 322, Interview 1, Alice, 2/09/2014).

Through the doing of the highlighting, the teachers were coordinating an agreement about their priorities for their curriculum planning. There is no mention of students with disability at this stage as the Line of Sight document was regarded as authoritative, and the teachers were not questioning, adding to or manipulating the document, but rather the text was regulating the decisions and the priorities.

I: And do you share that work amongst yourselves?

Claire: We do.…rotated particular key learning areas. So this term I might doing

science and next term I might focus on doing the religion unit plan….to break up the work… But we’ll sit together to work out what we want done in the particular units. Which works quite well I think (Lines 264 – 266, Interview 1, Claire, 9/09/2014). Claire discussed the how they shared the workload once they had completed processes associated with the Line of Sight text. The social organisation of the processes mediated by the Line of Sight text continued beyond the initial meeting with colleagues and continued to regulate decisions made by the teachers. The division of the tasks associated with curriculum planning ensured a level of conformity amongst colleagues, structuring the work so that teachers felt they needed to generate curriculum plans in the same way as others did with less emphasis on designing learning sequences to meet the specific learning needs of students in their respective classes. Through the regulatory work of this text, planning curriculum for students with disability, was therefore an additional action for individual teachers that was structurally situated beyond the centrally designed curriculum planning process.

Although the Line of Sight document formed a textual hub, the document was empty of one type of meaning in that it was a summary of the Australian Curriculum and did not add any interpretation or additional information, yet it had another type of meaning as it regulated teacher work. The hub activated professional discussions, as they met together during the school day in the meeting room, to highlight and colour code the document. For Alice, this then coordinated a series of independent actions associated with teacher-generated texts, undertaken at home and at school leading to the documentation such as the unit plan. David named team planning as a textual hub, the team planning process which included

meetings/dialogue with his year level colleagues to identify the focus for learning for the following term, however the basis of this process with the Line of Sight document. Although

David did not specifically name the Line of Sight text at this juncture he described the outcome of the meeting was a colour-coded document for the Learning Areas.

Texts used in the curriculum planning process played an important role in the social organisation of the local school community. Local actions arising from using the texts contributed to maintaining the institutional status quo. For example, the year level planning meeting was a school-endorsed text. The status quo was maintained by the regulatory texts of the learning support grid and the student learning folio. The learning support grid regulated interactions between the class teacher and the learning support teacher. The learning support teacher provided the text to the teacher, initiated a meeting with the teacher to discuss the content, thereby ensuring continued use of the text. Class teachers participated in the social actions associated with the learning support grid by talking about the information provided in the text with the learning support teacher. Another example of coordinated social

organisation was the student learning folio, when teachers annotated student work samples and added these to the student learning folio which was then passed onto the teacher the following year. The requirement to pass this folio onto the next teacher ensured the maintenance of the text within the institution. Both the student learning folio and learning support grid were texts that had the potential to focus on informing personalising curriculum planning for students with disability, but their main role seemed to be coordinating teachers’ everyday/everynight activities in ways that did not fulfil this potential. These texts were replicated across time, year to year, and across sites, teacher to teacher and their classrooms. These translocal activities assisted to maintain the institutional use of these texts.

Not all texts regulated teacher work in the same way. Turner (2001) suggests that texts that come to hand immediately are those that frame informants’ discussions about their work and therefore are those for which there is most focused attention, thereby mediating daily activities. Each of the teachers spoke of the team meeting identifying this dialogic process as

a ruling text as it coordinated a range of actions. While not formulaic, an equation represents the process: text + talk = social relations = ruling relations = ruling texts (D. E. Smith, 2005). The team meeting was an intersecting text that coordinated different actions for teachers. For Beth and David, who were both very student focused, this led to their additional curriculum planning actions for students with disability after the team meeting. Their planning responses drew on social relational texts, such as individual student goals and lesson sequence

respectively, teacher-generated texts they could develop in response to student specific interests. Whereas when Alice was planning for students with disability, the team planning meeting led her to consideration of the data about students with disability presented in the learning support grid. From this text she added specific student data to unit planning, a teacher-generated text. The way the teachers’ each responded to the texts from the textual hub, what texts they preferred and disregarded or minimised the value of texts or those they did not, coordinated sequences of actions that preserved and nurtured ruling relations. These choices were negotiated within influential social relations.

Social relations are formed across time and space, and are embedded in the talk and actions of the participants (Campbell, 2006), which is shaped by texts of the institution (G. W. Smith, Mykhalovskiy, & Weatherbee, 2006). The talk at the team meetings for David mediated the term overview, unit planning and the student report card. Although these actions were followed through independent of colleagues, it provided a common and shared language for David to follow up with his year level colleagues, “...we did collaborate a lot now, so at least once a week we would have noncontact time for an hour to see what you are doing...” (Line 67, Interview 1, David, 10/09/2014). The social relations embedded in the talk, and the actions that followed facilitated professional dialogues with his colleagues. Furthermore, Claire explained how she organised her work following the talk that

to our individual instruction and the way we ran our classroom individually” (Line 92, Interview 1, Claire, 9/09/2014). Smith contends that when anyone speaks in a sensible and coherent manner about their lives, they also speak of social relations (Campbell & Gregor, 2004, p. 79). The school and institution shaped the social relations of participants through the provision of release time for year level planning, whereby year level colleagues planned together, with subsequent curriculum planning work completed at their own discretion, in a time and space determined independently.

As the informants described how their everyday/everynight work was entwined with their daily life, and they communicated the minutiae of their relationships with colleagues, families and friends, the social organisation of their relationships and how this structure influenced their everyday/everynight work became apparent. Alice worked at night, around her young family’s needs; Beth worked all day Sunday, her friends and family knew not to invite her social events. Claire liked to get to school early in the morning; it was at this time that she collaborated with other early arriving colleagues. Whereas David collaborated online, his collegial support came from a virtual online community that he accessed mostly at night to support him in his everyday/everynight work. The everyday/everynight curriculum planning work of these teachers was constant and permeated their lives in such a way that it was organising when, where and how they worked as well as when they socialised with family and friend.