teaching.mrbelshaw.co.uk

WARNING! This website is no longer actively maintained. It is an archive of 2 years work by Doug Belshaw who now blogs at dougbelshaw.com...

Whilst everyone else is winding down a bit in the summer term, my life gets more hectic. Although now that I’ve got a job for next year I now longer have to laboriously complete application forms and write letters of application, I’ve still got a shedload of work for my Ed.D. to complete and then I’m marking AS-level History scripts! As part of the research I’ve done this morning I came across some thought-provoking stuff on teachers, middle-class culture and the issue of conformity…

It struck me in my NQT year, teaching students from some of the most socio-economically deprived backgrounds in Nottinghamshire, that my middle-class values and ideals were not only not shared by those students, but that who was I to impress those ideals upon them? I had never questioned the implicit value judgement made by those in educational institutions that middle-class culture might not be something that students from working-class backgrounds aspire to. So to make judgements about students based on their conformity to a middle-class conception of education is wrong. I came across this excellent summary of Keddie’s (1971) work. It says that Keddie…

…argued that despite thier commitment to treating pupils in individualized terms and their opposition to ability grouping… teachers nonetheless judged pupils in terms of an academic ideal and according to their membership of different ability groups. Furthermore their classroom teaching was transmission oriented so that in order to ‘learn’ pupils had to adopt the perspective of the teacher. It was the top band pupils who conformed in this way and who were regarded by the teachers as closes to their conception of the ideal pupil. The lower band pupils challenged teachers’ perspectives, and were accordingly declared unintelligent.
(Atkinson, Delamont & Hammersley, ‘Qualititative Research Traditions’ (in M. Hammersley (ed.), Educational Research: current issues, OUP, 1993) p.23-24)

Social cohesion and some degree of conformity are, of course, part of the reason we educate young people via coercion in this country. But to hold up conformity as a good in and of itself must be questioned. A school governor or (unenlightened) parent may be impressed to walk into a classroom where the students are all writing silently at their desks, but I would argue that done often in many different subjects, this does not lead to optimal learning. That’s why I’m delighted that on the tour I had yesterday of the school at which I’ll be working next year I saw students obviously enjoying themselves and learning through the use of drama, hands-on experiments and ICT alongside more traditional teaching methods. Of course discipline is at the heart of any effective school, but we mustn’t prize obedience and conformity above learning which is, after all, the main reason why students attend school.

That means letting go of the traditional notion of school culture. In today’s multicultural and personalised society the way to ensure a strong commitment to education is to make it relevant to the lives and backgrounds of each learner. And whilst this sounds all very idealistic, it means on a fairly basic level simply letting go of what you expect a student to be. Should they wear uniforms? If so, for what purpose? Should all students attend school every day? Why? Are GCSE examinations only for 16 year-olds? Are AS-levels? What kinds of responsibilites can be devolved to students in a school? Which should be held back? Why? (for more on this, visit Clarence Fisher’s Classroom Change wiki - and especially the Negative Thinking page…)

When we deny students a voice because we don’t agree with their cultural values and norms we are denying them a voice. I’ll end this post with a summary of Willis’ (1977) Learning to Labour about 12 ‘lads’ in a secondary modern school:

Willis argued that these pupils developed a counterculture to the school that was founded on the working-class culture experienced by their fathers on the factory floor. This school counterculture was not, however, a simple derivation from shop-floor culture; it was a creative response by the ‘lads’ to their experiences at school. Willis argued that, whereas in some respects this counterculture ‘penetrated’ to the reality of British capitalist society, in others it was distorted by ideology. Moreover, its effect was, ironically, to prepare the lads for factory work rather than to lead them to challenge society. Willis did not believe this to be a necessary effect of the counterculture, however, and proposed that radical pedagogy should be concerned with developing the insights implicit in the counterculture into a radical challenge to capitalism.
(Atkinson, Delamont & Hammersley, ‘Qualititative Research Traditions’ (in M. Hammersley (ed.), Educational Research: current issues, OUP, 1993) p.24)

I’m not up for challenging capitalism - not yet, anyway. What I am impressed with, though, is sociolinguistics - a research method which questions any model that proposes school as an enriching envirnoment and home as deficient. Whilst this may be the case in a great deal of cases, it’s hardly an assumption that one can take on a macro level, is it?

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