School Resource Centre

MICHAEL SCHRATZ and ULF BLOSSING

BIG CHANGE QUESTION SHOULD PUPILS BE ABLE TO MAKE DECISIONS ABOUT SCHOOL CHANGE?

MICHAEL SCHRATZ 1. Trapped in the School Discourse My simple answer is ‘‘Yes,’’ followed by the inevitable ‘‘but’’ ... they need the right ‘‘literacy’’ to do so. Whereas in everyday situations young people take up responsibility for real life decisions (e.g. the use of cellular phones with all the costs involved), in school they are still seen as the pupils who have to learn about life. Whereas communicative practices in the life world challenge their daily behaviour to acquire literacy as social practice, teaching and learning practices in the school world restrict them to literacy practices associated with their roles in the classroom. Two main discourse patterns hinder pupils’ participation in decision-making and their control over their learning and learning environment. On the one hand, it is the discourse of teaching and learning, which builds on the power relationship between teachers and learners in the teaching–learning interaction. According to the IRE pattern (Initiation – Response – Evaluation; see Mehan & Schratz, 1993), the teacher is ‘‘right’’ and the pupil has to follow suit. There is a clear hierarchy in the institutional discourse of teaching and learning in school. The introduction of standards in many education systems has even increased the hierarchical power relationship between children and teachers, although they are meant to be ‘‘customer’’ oriented. On the other hand, it is the discourse on change drawing on the rhetoric of organisational development, which is very much detached from pupils’ lives in school. Even teachers show reluctance to take up the jargon of organizational development for its managerial rhetoric (change management, benchmarks, 360 degree evaluation ...), let alone the pupils. As a consequence, mostly they do not have much say in school development processes.

Journal of Educational Change (2005) 6: 381–393 DOI 10.1007/s10833-005-4088-0

Ó Springer 2005

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Pupils are able to be more involved in the way the school is run, if conventional discourse patterns of teaching, learning and organisational change are shaped in new communicative practices which change the relationship of power. Conventional communication patterns using language suffer from the fact that the power relationship is too much in favour of the adults when young people are confronted with verbal argumentation. Therefore we have to find other possibilities to deal with the ‘‘inner world’’ of schools from the children’s perspective without falling into the traps set by language. That is why we have to develop communicative strategies which are more appropriate to their particular context. When we use digital communication channels, which determine everyday school life, we touch on the limitations of language. The literacy concept behind it perpetuates the pupils’ deprivation of decision-making in school change: the language of change is simply not their language, and therefore their resistance is often expressed in their silence or passivity. In our work we have experimented more with analogic forms of communication, which give the pupils more ownership over the process of decision-making. Analogic communication is more open to the individual biographical context, giving the children space to make meaning in their own ways of communicating. Here I present two examples of how communicative practices embedded in relationships of power can be changed, showing that pupils can be empowered to make decisions about school change by analogical approaches.

2. Giving Pupils a Voice Visuals are excellent means to increase children’s participation in decision-making and control over their learning and learning environment. This is why I provide pupils with a camera, helping them to understand their school as a learning organisation. This visual device helps them to find new ways of looking at school life from a different perspective. The results are not only the evidence of what an individual sees, not just documents but an evaluation of the world view. The pictures taken give a visual insight into the ‘‘interconnectedness’’ between places, rooms, areas and feelings, emotions, and associations, which usually receive little attention in education – and even less in schooling, where teaching is mainly based on cognitive aspects of the curriculum. For Rob Walker (1993), the use of photographs

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opens up the potential, however elusive the achievement, to find ways of thinking about social life that escape the traps set by language. For him, looking at photographs creates a tension between the image and the picture, between what one expects to observe and what one actually sees. Therefore, images are not just adjuncts to print, but carry heavy cultural traffic on their own account. Taking pictures with the camera gives the pupils the freedom to evaluate their learning and learning environments. The evidence they get in the form of photographs opens up new possibilities. By giving visual evidence – e.g. of how they experience learning – they become socially literate in negotiating change with their teachers. The following examples give some insight. 2.1. Example 1 The pupils in an English school presented the teachers pictures of positive and negative learning experiences. The teachers could not but accept the pupils’ evidences deeply rooted in their biographies. They decided that each subject team would invite one student each as a learning representative into their team who represents the demands of the children’s learning.

2.2. Example 2 Children in grade 4 of an American primary school are given digital cameras to take pictures of situations which enhance learning and which hinder learning. The teachers were very worried when the

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students strolled through the school and even left the main building in order to find the motif of a situation they need for their photograph. The teachers were concerned that the pupils were allowed to move freely and to make their own decisions.

3. Dealing With Multiple Realities Organisational change does not only deal with one ‘‘reality’’ in schools, but with multiple realities. Photographing offers a challenging opportunity to bring to the fore the different layers of reality of the pupils’ world in schools. To do so, the camera forms a special lens which can be focused on the single elements of school life by moving between the foreground and the background and thus enabling ‘‘unimportant details’’ to become the main focus of interest. Parts of the micro system of a school can be ‘‘deranged’’ by isolating elements from the whole, because they can be viewed from a different angle. Thus, in the picture taken by the pupils, the head’s office is no longer the administrative centre of the school, but commented on as ‘‘not an enjoyable place because behind that door there are dangers lurking.’’ For them the staff room is not, as it is for the teachers, the only retreat to their professional community, but ‘‘this is the place where boring lessons come from.’’ As in everyday life, there is no ‘‘real’’ reality and no comprehensive human consensus; there are only islands of agreement in a sea of different opinions. In the first place, taking pictures builds a bridge to the pupils’ everyday lives, especially of the young people’s feelings, because usually they perceive that there is a deep abyss between their own

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priorities and adults’ ones. Therefore they experience an intensive discrepancy between the parts of life they appreciate and those promoted through ‘‘official’’ attitudes. On the other hand they permanently experience how that very world is depreciated in the official school curriculum, how it is forgotten or, at best, tolerated, assuming that it does not interfere with the world of adult values! In the official school curriculum questions look different from those which children and young people ask in their everyday world of schooling. They are the typical school questions, to which the correct answer is already known and which form the basis for the universal pattern of teaching. They serve the purpose of conveying functional knowledge for surviving the (future?) challenges of life. However, when the pupils move through the school building taking photographs, discussing and reflecting ‘‘in the jungle of feelings,’’ this fine distinction between learning questions and life questions is partially compensated. They are trying to find the unknown in the known and to sense where relationships exist between their school world and their world of feelings: it is their own appreciation that counts; what is important is how they feel. In the course of the project they are asked to articulate those feelings and make them accessible, which brings in a further element but does not change things generally. Freezing objects in the pictures, however, should not only be an occasion for beginning to reflect and exchange experiences of different feelings in order to be put to rest as frozen picture in the school chronicle. More than that, the visual evidence, together with the comments pupils have written on the photos, should be intended to start the staff thinking about how some of the changes in the organisation of a school day or in the infrastructure of the building might be possible (e.g. a second break to be spent outside). The photo documents are harder ‘‘facts’’ than individual verbal expressions by pupils which often do not even reach the ears of the person in charge. In this form they become important pieces of testimony for living out forgotten (or suppressed) reasoning.

4. Changing the Discourse There is a strong argument about pupils’ inferior representation in school council work. This might be true from a conventional view of how regular school councils function according to an adult model. Pupils have few strategies of their own; they work according to the

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given criteria by chairing a meeting, or participating in discussions and decision-making. In the council meeting they usually gain permission from the teacher rather than negotiating within the council as a whole. In a study entitled ‘‘Empowering Children through Visual Communication,’’ Sue Cox and Anna Robinson-Pant (2005) used specific visual approaches derived from PRA (Participatory Rural Appraisal) to develop communicative strategies enabling pupils to participate more successfully in formal decision-making processes. For them there is more for pupils to learn as class representatives than chairing a meeting and simply participating. The children had limited ownership over the process of decisionmaking, and the transfer of responsibility from teachers to pupils in school council practices often intensified existing inequalities between children and their peers. As a consequence, Cox and Robinson-Pant started working with the pupils to develop alternative strategies, which helped them to be able to shape arguments in their own way. They therefore began to extend the range of communicative practices. In conclusion, if pupil involvement in decisions about school change is to be taken seriously, it cannot be achieved within existing discourses of teaching, learning and organisational change. Rather, we will need to engage much more seriously with pupils’ reality, which means finding alternative communicating mechanisms that will help shift the balance of power, and give young people the freedom to ‘‘articulate’’ their observations about their schooling experience. Pupils conducting research into their workplace confront their teachers with the ‘‘hard realities’’ of the context of their learning experiences. These are no minor aspects of school life, as we have heard them called by some people. A mere attitude of, ‘‘You can’t change things anyway!’’ expresses an externally visible resignation often mirrored in a negative attitude. If we do not take seriously pupils’ requests in the area of the ‘‘hard’’ architecture, we will also fail in those attempts which are related to the social architecture of the school. The more pupils identify with their school, the more they also assume responsibility for it. References Cox, S. & Robinson-Pant, A. (2005). Communicative practices and participation in school councils in primary schools in the United Kingdom. In B.V. Street (ed),

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Literacies Across Educational Contexts – Mediating, Learning and Teaching. London: Caslong. Mehan, H. & Schratz, M. (1993). Gulliver travels into a math class: In search of alternative discourse in teaching and learning. International Journal for Educational Research 19(5), 247–264. Walker, R. (1993). Finding a silent voice for the researcher. Using photographs in evaluation and research. In M. Schratz (ed), Qualitative Voices in Educational Research. London: Falmer. MICHAEL SCHRATZ

University of Innsbruck Austria E-mail: [email protected] DOI 10.1007/s10833-005-4178-z

ULF BLOSSING

SHOULD PUPILS BE ABLE TO MAKE DECISIONS ABOUT SCHOOL CHANGE?

Teachers and pupils are the two most important elements of a school’s community. Each has their own traditional, allotted role. Teachers ‘‘do the teaching’’ and pupils are ‘‘there to learn’’. Teachers tend to spend their whole working life in a school while pupils spend a large and very important part of their early life there; a time when their attitudes to the future and to their roles and relationships in society will be shaped. During this critical, formative period in their lives, pupils look carefully at the grown-ups, their teachers, to see what they tell them about how to tackle life’s problems and those of relating to society and becoming a part of it in a way they comprehend as meaningful. From this perspective, schools’ key mission should be to instil in pupils a belief in their future life. It should be about demonstrating that it is worth talking to the grown-ups in school about problematic situations and relationships. It should also be about proving that it is worth trying to put improvement ideas forward and trying to make them happen. In other words, this is an opportunity to engender

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belief in the democratic process and send an important message to youngsters that the democratic model functions, that it is worth trying to make your opinion heard and engage with others in changing your environment for the better. But even if pupils are empowered to make real decisions about school change, are they able to do so? Do they have the maturity, experience and skills? There can be little doubt that young people can deliver a detailed review of problematic situations and relationships in school without difficulty because they observe them and experience them first hand, day after day. Youngsters in school also have an important advantage compared to teachers, many of whom have spent a very long time in school, because pupils are relieved of the burden of tradition. Young people, therefore, can come up with more innovative and unconventional solutions than teachers, solutions that may challenge traditional structures and cultures and but which have the potential to form the foundations for real long term change in schools. Do we really believe that change at the local level, on the ground, can be achieved without fully involving the people who make up the majority of the school community? How can we expect change to happen when this great part of the community, the pupils, can so easily resist it if they decide it is not in their interests? In other words, pupils are the main channel for providing a response and commentary on the action teachers take to make school change and improvement happen. 5. Pupils’ Role in School Change In the Albatross project in Sweden (Blossing, 1998), the organisational development of eight schools was mapped out. Teachers reported that they rarely got any responses to their own teaching work from school leaders or other adults. Instead, it was the pupils who provided the most important response and thereby shaped the outcome of improvement efforts. I found that teachers, when carrying out improvement work, broke a kind of invisible contract with the pupils that actually stopped improvement efforts. The pupils expected their teachers to teach in a way corresponding to the grading system. When teachers, encouraged by a positive developmental climate in the school, broke this agreement by introducing new work methods that did not correspond to the way the pupils were used to being assessed, the pupil–teacher relationship was

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exposed to some strain. The pupils were encouraged to participate in the teaching experiment but, like their teachers, they needed time to get used to the new methods. When crunch time came around, the pupils discovered they were not being assessed according to the new work method’s yardstick but continued to be judged according the old way of working, by means of individual, written assignments. The pupils did not like this, and showed their displeasure. Since the teachers were dependent on a positive response from pupils for their own well-being, they stopped their developmental efforts and returned to teaching ‘to rule’; in other words, in accordance with the invisible contract which said that they should keep to the work methods the pupils expected of them and which were in agreement with the forms of assessment. The relationship between teachers and pupils was restored. The lesson learned is that involving pupils in the change process is necessary to ensure implementation of an improvement effort and turn it into a new working routine. Furthermore, pupil involvement of this kind is basically about democratic processes, because the first action needed is to organise a dialogue where different views of interest can be expressed. By this means it is possible to foster understanding of the change initiative. In the research literature this first phase of the change process is called initiating or introduction and is described as a kind of learning period where different activities are organised to promote understanding of the improvement proposals needed for a specific situation. The question ‘‘should pupils make decisions about school change?’’ relates to the issue of pupil influence in general and to the basic democratic structure of schools. This specific question could give the impression that the general questions about pupil influence or whether the foundations of western schools are democratic for both teachers and pupils have either been resolved or are grounded and integrated in schools. The specific question could also imply a critical point in the development of pupil influence and, so to speak, put the finger on a fundamental mechanism. I will discuss and explore these assumptions by offering a short review of recent Swedish school reform and its outcomes. 6. The Development of the Democratic Structure of Swedish Schools Dewey’s ideas, among others, influenced Swedish policy makers after the Second World War and during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. Participation of pupils in creating their learning process became an

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increasing focus within the national curriculum. In the curriculum of 1980, it was established that, working with their teachers, pupils should create rules for school work and life in schools. It was also established that pupils together with their teachers should decide for how long and in what order they want to study different objectives as well as how and what information material to use. Schools were expected to make use of experiential working methods where pupils were given responsibility for asking questions, finding ways to analyse answers and draw conclusions. It was also expected that pupils would get involved in a yearly evaluation of their own as well as teachers’ work. Besides the demands of democratisation of the methodology of teaching, the government also wanted schools to establish formal class councils where pupils could raise questions. Every school was expected to set up a pupils’ council for the interests of all pupils in the school. The national curriculum of 1980 was the result of a commission of inquiry to find ways to improve the inner life of schools for pupils as well as the participation and efficiency of teachers and school leaders. In a study following 35 schools from 1980 to 2001, we have found that while structures and processes fostering participation have undoubtedly improved significantly for teachers, in most of the schools they have improved quite slowly for pupils (Blossing & Ekholm, 2005). In 1980, 23 schools had a solitary working organisation where the school leader made most decisions by him- or her-self, and where teachers planned their teaching without cooperating with colleagues. By 2001, only five schools still had such a working organisation. Instead, they utilised different forms of collective working practices based on cooperation and dialogue. This is illustrated by the fact that during the 20-year period the number of schools where teachers were involved in goal discussions increased from 7 to 26, and the number where teachers cooperated in writing a working plan on how to achieve the curriculum goals increased from 0 to 29. The picture for pupil involvement over the same period was, however, different. Looking at the structure for encouraging pupil participation and democracy, developing ways of working that include making use of experiential learning giving pupils responsibility for asking questions, finding ways to examine questions and draw conclusions, the increase was from zero in 1980 to only 12 schools in 2001. And while 39 percent of the schools had class councils in place in 1980, this decreased to 31 percent by 2001. So, in spite of the national curriculum placing a heavy emphasis on pupil influence, the study of the 35 schools shows a very modest level of this

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influence becoming embedded over time. With good reason one might ask: do teachers and school leaders genuinely believe that pupils should have influence? Is it a question of teacher attitude or are there other mechanisms or ways to understand why the growth in pupil influence is so slow in coming? One obvious reason is that the directions and regulations regarding class councils have been softened. Class councils were mandatory in the 1980 curriculum, and the government distributed economic resources for implementation, some of which was to be used to organise and set up class councils. Since the 1994 curriculum, directions have become more vague, and schools are free to find their own ways for ensuring pupil influence. In this situation, schools tend to argue that the best forms are those that focus on changing the ways of working as opposed to formal democratic dialogue through class councils. Class councils are seen to be meaningless, say some teachers, because pupils do not get involved and put questions on the agenda, and therefore they argue it is better to change working ways into a structure where pupils have increased responsibility of their work, demonstrating more real pupil influence. The problem is that these new ways of organising pupils’ self-managed work (e.g. by letting pupils choose what assignment to do when and where during so called ‘‘free’’ working periods) are criticised for not setting pupils’ learning free but instead for disciplining it even more strictly according to what teachers have already decided they should do. 7. Understanding the Never Ending Debate of Pupil Influence as a Matter of Power Distribution Other, and much more important, mechanisms question whether the traditional teacher role can in fact be maintained if pupils are given influence. I believe we cannot ask that question without addressing the question about power distribution in schools and without asking whether teachers should be seen as lead members in a learning community rather than teachers or ‘didacts’ delivering expert knowledge to pupils; and changing teachers’ role, from the ‘expert/ client role’ to leaders in a community of young learners. Real pupil influence that is going to affect learning and improvement efforts in schools presupposes that teachers must give up some of their power to decide what questions make up the agenda and instead become learners themselves working to understand what is in pupils’ minds,

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what their views and attitudes are to the learning situation. This means that teachers must come down from their expert thrones and empower young people to ask their own questions in school, scrutinising their school situation to detect deficiencies in learning conditions, inventing ways to make it better and being involved in improvement work to make it happen. Changing the teachers’ role is long term work. There is no apparent current consensus among the profession regarding the nature of improvement efforts. Knowledge about improvement efforts is quite low and teacher groups do not tend to think that it is part of a teacher’s duty anyway. In Sweden, there have been strong efforts to change the teacher’s role over the more than 20 years we were studying the 35 schools. This change is strongly linked to issues of school improvement. Teachers’ unions promoted a range of school development initiatives during the last decade of the 20th century. In agreements between teachers’ unions and the union of the Swedish local authorities, structures were put in place to secure schools’ progress. One example is that teachers, since the first years of the 1990s, have used six percent of their yearly working time for the development of their skills and competencies. This is about 13 days a year that teachers use for planning with others and for inservice training of different kinds. This structure was present in all the 35 schools studied. Another outcome of the agreements reached during the 1990s was that many districts renovated their schools so that they contain working areas for teachers. In these areas, each teacher has his or her own working space including a computer. This move has helped teachers stay in the school when planning and when following up work with students. In some schools, space has also been given for meeting rooms, which has helped develop cooperative processes. In schools where we found that collective planning among teachers has become normalised, changes have occurred during the1980s and 1990s. The basis for institutionalisation of new working patterns among teachers has been a mixture of material changes and changes in norms among teachers. Earlier attitudes stating that every teacher was doing as well as he or she could and therefore it was reasonable for them to work in isolation, have slowly been replaced by attitudes saying that no one, not even a teacher, is perfect. Therefore they may need to get feedback from others and may also need to receive help to do better. These norm changes have been significant in stimulating the development of more collective forms of work. The long term study of the 35 schools shows that you can restructure schools and change the teachers’ role so they become

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better in carrying out improvement, but they can still cling on to a balance of power promoting an expert role in relation to pupils that neither fosters pupil influence in relation to working practices nor democratic councils. The study shows that schools that succeed in implementing class councils also strongly focus on the specific issue of pupil influence in their schools’ improvement efforts, find clear structures to make it happen and carefully follow up implementation to foster institutionalisation of changes. To conclude: pupils should be able to make decisions about school change because that is the way to let pupils see that the democratic model is working. Decisions about school change and pupil influence matter because it is about redistributing power between the two largest groups in school, teachers and pupils. Pupils need to make decisions about school change. Their voice needs to be heard because they possess vast resources of observation and knowledge about school life from which they can monitor and review. What is more, they are young and unspoiled, not burdened with tradition, and are therefore well placed to put innovative improvement proposals forward. The democratic structure of schools, however, still must be addressed. The specific question of letting pupils make decisions about school change brings into sharp focus how important it is. REFERENCES Blossing, U. (1998). Skolan som en lokal organisation – en fo¨rstudie av 8 skolor i Albatrossprojektet. Om hur kvalitetssa¨kring, beslutsfattande, normer, grupperingar och arbetssa¨tt inverkar pa˚ skolornas utvecklingsarbete (School as a local organisation – a pilot study of 8 schools in the Albatross project. About how quality assurance, decision-making, norms, groupings and working ways affect the developmental work in schools.) (Arbetslivsrapport No. 1998:27). Solna: Arbetslivsinstitutet. Blossing, U. & Ekholm, M. (2005). A central school reform programme in Sweden and the local response: Taking the long term view works. A twenty year longitudinal study of 35 Swedish ‘‘grund’’ schools. Paper presented at the International Congress for School Effectiveness and School Improvement, Barcelona, Spain. ULF BLOSSING

Department of Educational Sciences Karlstad University Sweden E-mail: [email protected]