The previous chapters have outlined the case for the suggestion that, since the introduction of the 1988 Education Reform Act teachers, and particularly headteachers, have been under pressure to conform to the expectations of policy makers. This pressure will also have differed from area to area and school to school, according to a number of variables. These include the support which each headteacher feels that she has from other stakeholders in the system, how the management structure of the school supports her by allowing a suitable division of labour across the tasks to be performed, the tools available to them and whether each headteacher considered the changes accompanying the strategies to be educationally sound.
The professional identities of the headteachers will have been developed through the interactions they have had with the school communities in the systems within which they have worked. As Goodson (1992, p. 116) suggests:
Life experience and background are obviously key ingredients of the people that we are, of our sense of self. To the degree that we invest our ‘self’ in our teaching, experience and background therefore shape our practice.
Each headteacher will normally have worked in different systems and therefore had different experiences and developed a distinct professional identity. It is appropriate, therefore, to consider each headteacher as an individual and look at her professional history individually, and thus it is also appropriate to use narrative accounts of their professional histories as a way of collecting and considering this information.
These headteachers do, however, work in highly social contexts, where the actions of each person within the system will affect other members of that system, including those who are more remote from the schools, such as the DfES. The analysis of the data gained from gathering narrative accounts from the headteachers will need to take this social aspect into
account. An appropriate tool for this analysis is the activity triangle, which stems from activity theory, but in this case will be used as a stand-alone heuristic device, separate from the theory upon which it is founded. A short commentary on activity theory is, nevertheless, included to give the reader some understanding of the basis upon which the activity triangle is founded.
Narrative accounts of headteachers’ life histories
When discussing the field of educational leadership as a research area, Gunter and Ribbins (2003) suggest that it is suitable to divide knowledge production into six knowledge provinces. Although these are discussed later in this chapter and revisited in Chapter 8, it is worth drawing attention here to the point that, using their definitions, the major portion of this study resides in the humanistic province where narrative is an appropriate methodology.
Denzin effectively encapsulates the social and contextual aspect of narrative, and how understandings and practices are passed on within a particular context when he says:
The stories that members of groups pass on to one another are reflective of understandings and practices that are at work in the larger system of cultural understandings that are acted upon by group members. (Denzin 1999, p.99)
It is the researcher’s contention that rapid and fundamental contextual changes cause undue stress to the members of that cultural system, yet research into stress within education largely seems to concentrate upon the individual. These individualistic notions of stress in psychological research tend to be restrictive and therefore lead to ‘within person’ research, effectively minimising, or sometimes even disregarding the contextual aspects which, in schools, are so important. Teachers (including headteachers) work within an environment where the social, emotional and psychological characteristics of their work are extremely important and play a valuable part in the everyday completion of their duties.
The interaction between individuals and the contexts within which they find themselves is extremely complex. As previously noted, the extent to which this interaction causes stress is, at least partially, dependent upon whether they can - through interaction with their immediate context - alter the conditions of their local environment, essentially working on the context they are working within to effect a change on that context. A consequence of any alteration of the conditions within which individuals are acting is that there is a change in the job satisfaction they feel due to an alteration in the balance between satisfiers and dissatisfiers (Nias 1989) and therefore a related change in the subject’s stress level.
This immediate context is, of course, within a wider context of its own (e.g. the school working within the policies imposed by the LEA, which is itself working within any restrictions applied by the DfES). That is not to say that these policies and restrictions are essentially inappropriate or unnecessary but it should be noted that they impose a framework, or can lead to a rigidity within the context, which may, in turn, lead to a tendency to resist the imposition of change. Hoyle and Wallace (2005, p.viii) suggest that “most headteachers and teachers have […] mediated government policies to render them congruent with the needs of individual students in individual contexts”. This pragmatic approach to the implementation of government policies by those at the ‘chalk-face’ of education can have the effect of constraining and contextualising those policies so that their effects are directed in ways which are considered appropriate by the implementers. An analogy from chemistry which may help describe this resistance is Le Chatelier’s principle, which says that a system in equilibrium which has an external constraint put upon it, in order to impose a change on that equilibrium, will react in opposition to that constraint in order to maintain the original equilibrium. The tendency to strive to maintain the status quo may be
seen as analogous to the operation of Le Chatelier’s principle, though to equate the two would be reductionist.
Changes will only be effective if the force for change is either powerful enough to overcome any opposition, or is sufficiently advantageous (continuing with the chemical analogy) to have an autocatalytic effect - so that a small change produces its own positive effects which encourage uptake of the ideas and principles which led to that change and therefore increase both the rate and the extent of that change. These two constraints, or forces for change, tend to have different points of origin; the extremely powerful force emanates from an influential source and therefore tends to be external, whereas the autocatalytic change normally stems from an intimate knowledge of the conditions within a context and thus usually originates from within that context. The majority of the educational policies introduced by the various governments since 1988 have been of the first, ‘powerful source’ type since their effect has been “through tightly specifying the work of headteachers and teachers and this has been coupled with equally tight surveillance and punitive measures for failure to meet this specification” (Hoyle and Wallace, 2005, p.vii).
In order to study the interaction of individuals and their contexts the narratives provided by eight headteachers will be used. These will be verified using data from interviews with the four contact inspectors with special responsibility for the schools which are led by those eight headteachers. These narratives will need to look at contextual change over a number of years and more specifically how the contexts have been changed by external pressures (i.e. governmental initiatives) and the impact this has had upon their professional lives. The use of narratives will allow a highly focused investigation of particular individuals and their interrelationship with the ever-evolving context of their working environment to be carried out while at the same time affording the opportunity for detailed comparison of the stories of
individuals, thus permitting similarities to be examined. Connelly and Clandinin (1999, p.132) tell us that narrative and story telling, “are terms representing ideas about the nature of human experience and about how experience may be studied and represented.” Furthermore they suggest that these research techniques tread the middle course between the extremes of objectivists and experimentalists and that, “properly done […] they directly represent human experience; and […] give accounts that are educationally meaningful for participants and readers.” Once again, there is an emphasis upon the individual and that person’s experience but with appropriate guidance and analysis the stories of individuals can reflect their interaction with changing contexts and draw out the causes of stress and how developing individual–context relationships can reduce or exacerbate that stress over time. Connelly and Clandinin (ibid), quoting Carr (1986) point out, however, that, “Narrative enquiry may also be sociologically concerned with groups and the formation of community,” (p. 133) and suggest that while, in education, personal rather than social narrative enquiries have been more prevalent, there is an expectation that social narrative will be increasingly emphasised in [educational] research. They do not, though, give a time frame, nor a methodological route via which they think this might happen. This prediction of greater emphasis on social narrative was written shortly before the introduction of the Education Reform Act. In the years since this was written, the progress towards greater emphasis on social narrative enquiry has been slower than they suggested, so there is little written detail which this research may utilise. However, as Connelly and Clandinin point out later in the same text (p.134) “The educational importance of this line of work is that it brings theoretical ideas about the nature of human life as lived to bear on the educational experience as lived” and it is the relationship between the nature of human life and the educational experience (in context) which is being investigated. Cohen, Manion and
Morrison (2000) further reinforce this point, directing it more closely to the area that is being studied; they say:
Recent accounts of the perspectives and interpretations of people in a variety of educational settings are both significant and pertinent, for they provide valuable insights into the ways in which educational personnel come to terms with the constraints and conditions in which they work. Life histories, Goodson argues, have the potential to make a far-reaching contribution to the problem of understanding the links between “personal troubles” and “public issues,” a task that is at the heart of every sociological enterprise. (p. 165)
Since the task is to relate the personal troubles of individuals, specifically those which may be attributed to the stresses that are inherent within the British educational system, to the public issues surrounding the changes within that system, it would appear that this is an appropriate approach to take. It is appropriate, therefore, to use a technique that involves social narrative, as described above (narrative concerned with groups and the formation of community). More specifically it is appropriate to use narratives relating to the interactions of the individual headteachers with their working environments, and to consider how those interactions have varied as the working conditions have changed in the recent past. The term recent past may vary somewhat from person to person but will relate to the period between the mid-1980s and December 2005, which has, as was shown in Chapter 2, seen fundamental change of the educational context within which children are being taught and in which teachers, including headteachers, are working.
Connelly and Clandinin (1999, pp. 135-137) suggest that there are a variety of ways in which narrative enquiry may be approached, including, amongst others, oral history, stories, research interviews, journals, autobiographical and biographical writing, letters, conversations and document analysis. Since a small number of individual headteachers will be participating in this study and will be documenting their histories for the period when they have been working within institutions which have been subject to these changes,
interviews will be the most productive, yet easily used, method. This method also, however, gives opportunity to ‘slip into’ a conversational technique which Connelly and Clandinin (ibid) tell us, “may end up probing more deeply than aggressive questioning techniques,” and which may also be more suitable when dealing with those participants who are still wary of speaking freely about their difficulty coping with the stresses of their job in a formal interview situation.
Analytical principles
In order to analyse the influences upon headteachers it is appropriate to employ a heuristic which allows an analysis of the individual within the system (the school, as an organisation) in which they are working. This, in the case of headteachers, will be partly of their own making and partly structured by other participants in that system and, at a more fundamental level, will have been formed by the philosophies, activities and rules of those who have worked in that system throughout its history. One such heuristic is the activity triangle, proposed by Engeström, arising from his work which develops and continues that of Leont’ev, Luria and others on activity theory. This, heuristically useful, activity triangle allows us to place an emphasis upon mediation in the systems within which the headteachers have worked and also attend to specific features, such as rules, stakeholders and division of labour in work on the objects of those systems. Thus, the biographical data may be obtained from interviews with headteachers, regarding their professional histories between the time of the Education Reform Act (1988) and the time of the interviews (2005).
Locating the Study
Gunter and Ribbins (2003, p.262) suggest that there are six ‘knowledge provinces’ within which studies may fall, allowing them to be ‘mapped’ and then related to other studies of
educational leadership, where this is required. Their suggested knowledge provinces, and the knowledge claims underpinning them are:
Conceptual: Concerned with issues of ontology and epistemology, and with
conceptual classification.
Descriptive: Seeks to provide a factual report, often in some detail, of one or more
aspects of, or factors, relating to leaders, leading or leadership.
Humanistic: Seeks to gather and theorise from the experiences and biographies of
those who are leaders and managers and those who are managed and led.
Critical: Concerned to reveal and emancipate practitioners from injustice and
oppression of established power structures.
Evaluative: Concerned to measure the impact of leadership and its effectiveness of
micro, meso and macro levels of interaction.
Instrumental: Seeks to provide leaders and others with effective strategies and tactics
to deliver organisational and system level goals.
Mapping this study to these knowledge provinces, it may be seen that it has mainly drawn upon the knowledge claims relating to the humanistic and descriptive areas, since it gathers data from the experiences and biographies of the headteachers and seeks to provide a detailed factual report on factors relating to those headteachers and their leadership. It also seeks to utilise these data to draw out features of the similarities and differences that may lead to theoretical underpinning of the observations. However, while the study draws heavily upon the knowledge claims relating to these two areas, it also relates, to some extent, to the critical knowledge province since it concerns the contested nature of the contexts within which these headteachers were working and is concerned, through enhancing their own knowledge of their tensions, to help emancipate them from the results of those tensions. This small-scale mapping suggests that this study has a generally broad-based, eclectic nature and that it seeks to understand the experiences of the headteachers and use this understanding to help them. The humanistic element of this study lends itself well to data collection via narrative enquiry. The use of the activity triangle, however, should be more able to provide the appropriate detail for
the fulfilment of the descriptive aspect when considering the interactions between headteachers and their contexts. When the data have been obtained, therefore, the activity triangle will provide a template within which they may be placed in order to structure an appropriately focused analytical framework.
Activity theory – a brief explanation
Activity theory has been an integral part of cultural-historical psychology for several decades – Leont’ev (1978) developed a distinction between ‘activity’ and ‘action’ which were underdeveloped by Vygotsky (Daniels, 2001, p.86) and Cole was introduced to it when studying with Luria in 1979, though he initially interpreted it as roughly equivalent to American neobehaviourism of the 1960s (Cole, 1997, p.105). Despite this period of familiarity, there is still some discussion amongst researchers about its actual nature. Kuutti (1996, p.25) for instance says that, “Both parts of the term activity theory, referring to the Soviet-originated cultural-historical research tradition, are slightly misleading, because the tradition is neither interested in activities in general nor is it a theory, that is, a fixed body of accurately defined statements.”
Nardi, in the same volume, however, while agreeing with Kuutti’s point about theory (p.7) goes on to say (p.8) “Activity theory offers a set of perspectives on human activity and a set of concepts for describing that activity,” thus confirming that she considers that there is a definite interest in activities. Engeström and Mietinen (1999, p.1) demonstrate that they consider activity theory to actually be a theory when they introduce it with the words “activity theory is a commonly accepted name for a line of theorising and research initiated by the founders of the cultural-historical school of Russian psychology.” The point upon which they all agree, however, is that the historical foundations of activity theory lie within the Soviet cultural-historical tradition and particularly with Vygotsky, Leont’ev and Luria.
In a further description of activity theory, Nardi (1996, pp. 10-13) explains that it proposes a strong notion of mediation by mediators such as tools and sign systems in human experience and that these mediators are not merely channels through which experience is carried but are ties which connect us organically and intimately to the world of our experiences. Thus it “embeds our consciousness in a wider activity system and describes a dynamic by which changes in consciousness are directly related to the material and social conditions current in a person’s situation” (p.11).
This focus on the subject within the wider social context is another common feature in a number of explanatory texts on this topic (Cole, 1997; Daniels, 2001; Engeström, 1999; Kuutti, 1996 and Nardi, 1996). The social context is considered to be the unit of investigation and the individual is considered as a part of that context, shaped by it and acting within it. This, it appears, portrays the individual as a particularly passive part of the system in Engeström’s version of activity theory and may be considered a weakness where the study of the individual is concerned. This is reinforced by Kuutti (1996 p.26), who explains that even if individual actions are our main interest the object of our research is always essentially collective since the context is included in the unit of analysis. Daniels (2001 pp.83-84) further emphasises the collective emphasis of activity theory when he points out that the emphasis of activity theorists is “on the psychological impacts of organised activity and the social conditions and systems which are produced in and through such activity”. In this study the combination of biographical narrative and the activity triangle draws upon and emphasises the strengths of each approach by considering the