Researching teachers working with young adolescents: implications ...

Ethnography and Education Vol. 1, No. 1, March 2006, pp. 31
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Researching teachers working with young adolescents: implications for ethnographic research John Smyth* Texas State University
San Marcos, University of Ballarat, Charles Darwin University, and University of Waikato, New Zealand

Ethnography has the capacity to interrogate and unravel what Geertz called ‘webs of significance’ in respect of difficult and perplexing cultural issues. One arena that is especially troubling at the moment lies in the need to pose questions and explore more robust explanations as to how it is that some teachers of young adolescents seem to be able to reinvent themselves in ways that make a difference for this group of students. These are teachers who are working against the tide. What this paper does is provide some background urgency to the issue, asks questions about the efficacy of ethnography, and suggests some worthy next ethnographic steps in understanding an important and intractable imponderable. . . . man [sic] is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun. (Geertz, 1973, p. 5)

Introduction This paper aims to explore theoretically and practically how to better understand how it is that teachers work successfully in schools and classrooms with young adolescents. This is not something that occurs universally nor unproblematically. Mounting international evidence suggests that for an unacceptably large number of young adolescents, schooling is an alienating, bewildering, unsatisfying, unrewarding and damaging process, to the point where many make the active decision to give up, drift off, or drop out altogether. What this amounts to in many cases is a blatant process of being ‘pushed out’. This tendency is particularly pronounced for young people from non-middle class backgrounds. The situation is not much better either for many of their teachers who are deserting teaching in alarming numbers. While I don’t want to rehearse the multiplicity of reasons for the widening chasm between the educational haves and have-nots (see, for example, Smyth et al., 2004), or to explore the reasons for disengagement, disenchantment, school violence (Smyth et al., 2000), I do want to cast some light on this growing problem, by pointing to *School of Education, University of Ballarat, Australia. Email: [email protected] ISSN 1745-7823 (print)/ISSN 1745-7831 (online)/06/010031-21 # 2006 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/17457820500512754

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how we might understand what is happening when some teachers reinvent themselves in the quest to do something about the problem. My purpose is quite circumscribed. I want to explore how to undertake research that: (1) listens to the voices of young people in schools and the teachers who work with them, and (2) better understands how it is that some teachers of young adolescents are successfully reinventing themselves, their pedagogies and school cultures. In respect of both, I want to explore the particular merits of using ethnographic research methods to illuminate these issues. In doing this I will deal with four things: (1) the case for ethnographic studies in these difficult policy times; (2) some background that gives added urgency to the issue of schooling for young adolescents; (3) the appropriateness of using ethnographic research methods; and (4) some ethnographic next steps in terms of where to from here. The kind of ethnographic questions I want to foreground here are ones that are informed by the confrontation Erickson (2005) is currently engaged in with so-called ‘scientific’ research, also sometimes referred to as ‘evidence-based research’. Erickson argues that what is disturbing about the current infatuation with ‘scientific’ research is not only that it is ‘seriously flawed’ but that it represents ‘an extreme form of naı¨ve scientism’ (p. 4). Even more disturbing is the inability of this kind of research to ask crucial questions, and with a little licence and acknowledgement to Erickson, I have reframed the tenor of his argument as follows, for my purposes here in terms of a number of questions requiring urgent attention: . What is happening when increasing numbers of young adolescents give up on schooling? . What does this mean in terms of the life chances of these students? . How do teachers make sense of this given the relational nature of their work? . Indeed, how do teachers experience and make sense of educational policy regimes that appear prima facie to be damaging students? . Which students benefit from these reforms and which students experience diminished opportunities from schooling as a consequence of such reforms? . Among teachers who are attempting to limit the worst excesses of imposed policy reforms of this kind, how do these teachers reinvent themselves in the interests of students? While these are not meant as an exhaustive list of questions, they are nevertheless broadly indicative of ones unable to be answered by ‘scientific’ research using ‘randomized assignment of students to treatment and control groups’ (Erickson, 2005, p. 9). These are perplexing questions, only capable of being asked and addressed through ethnographic approaches. Revisiting the case for ethnographic studies in current policy times If we take a broad view of the current education policy trajectory in most western countries over the past couple of decades, we cannot but conclude that they have

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been less than sympathetic to schools and teachers. Policy regimes that have a fetish with measuring, calibrating, and engaging in endless and ultimately meaningless forms of economic reconciliation through forms of evidence-based practices end up being deeply distrustful if not overtly hostile towards teachers and students. In effect, they are saying teachers’ professional judgements about what constitutes ‘good’ teaching are not to be trusted and that what counts instead are so-called objective, neutral and value-free measurements of what is going on inside the black box of schooling and classrooms. There seems to be no conceptual understanding within such perspectives that such instrumental, inhospitable and unhelpful approaches cast little light on the mysteries of teaching and learning and on the contrary might be harmful and quite damaging. What seems inconceivable to this policy mindset is the possibility that an economically vibrant economy might just be one in which teachers, schools and students are valued and trusted. The paradox is that there is yet to emerge any incontrovertible evidence that adopting distrustful and muscular stances towards teachers and schools actually works; it seems that the reverse might actually be the case. It is from this kind of vantage point that ethnography has the inherent capacity to provide a powerful set of alternative viewpoints and perspectives as a focus for contestation. This is a point I shall return to shortly in more detail. Making the case for ethnographic studies in schools and classrooms hardly seems like a novel idea, and besides others have done that extensively already, but it seems to be warranted in these quantitatively-driven times. What makes this revisitation, for that is what it is, all the more necessary are the changing times and more complex conditions in which we live. The conditions of schooling for most young adolescents and their teachers are almost unrecognizable from what they were a couple of decades ago, most notably as a consequence of the decimation of the youth labour market, internationally. What we have on the scene now in schools is a considerably more complex student clientele, elements of which are much less inclined to compliantly and unquestioningly accept the extant status quo. In other words, the more complex mix of students makes it imperative that studies of schooling attempt to capture and render accounts of viewpoints, cultures and perspectives that this new group brings to schooling. What kind of insights are possible? Ethnographic studies of schooling have the potential to reveal the meaning of schooling as experienced by groups whose viewpoints have been ignored, denigrated or marginalized. In other words, if the education policy process is to be properly informed then it needs to access the perspectives of those most affected by schooling, and the only feasible and realistic way of doing that is through ethnographic means. If the intent behind educational policy is to bring about genuine school improvement, then hearing from those most deeply and intimately affected must be accorded a high priority*and this means acknowledging and elevating the importance of ethnographic studies of schooling. /

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Who would such ethnographic studies focus upon? Given what is increasingly being revealed about the crucial importance of relationships in learning, ethnographic approaches are uniquely positioned to examine the nature of connections and social relationships both within and across school
community contexts. What is particularly relevant from the vantage point of the argument in this paper is the potential of ethnographic research to examine the educative relationships between young people, their teachers, school cultures and communities and societies of which they are a part. Much can be learnt from adolescents about the educational process, and in particular: 1. 2.

3.

4.

what it means to be widely and sometimes maliciously misunderstood in a number of ways, as young people are at the moment; following on from people like Fine (1990), how it is that the popular imagination has become so saturated by a plethora of ‘ritualistic chanting and public traumatizing around the evils that will allegedly flow from undisciplined youth who are not completing schooling including a purported decline of international competitiveness, the shrinking taxpayer base and the rising crime and social restlessness’ (Smyth et al., 2004, p. 9); the linking of the alleged school ‘dropout problem’ among disaffected youth to a range of ‘public anxieties, terrors and ‘‘pathologies’’’ (Fine, 1990, p. 55) needs to be pulled apart because of the ‘ideological diversion’ (p. 65) that deflects attention away from broader issues like the collapse of the youth labour market and de-industrialization. What gets falsely constructed in these instances is a misplaced focus on groups labelled ‘at risk’ because of personal characteristics or family background and attributes; and as the social geographer David Sibley (1995) argues, we need to explore the ‘geographies of exclusion’*by which he means the ‘barriers. prohibitions and constraints on activities from the point of view of the excluded’ (p. x). /

By whom? Ethnographic research of the kind being argued for here requires researchers who are able to bring to bear an amalgam of significant and diverse attributes, including: (a) an understanding of how schools work as cultural institutions; (b) a sense of the crucial importance of how schools have the potential to construct an agenda around social justice that aims to improve the life chances of the least advantaged; (c) a capacity to understand and explore the crucial set of connections between schools and communities and how these work in supportive or unhelpful ways; and (d) above all, an orientation towards exploring and actively listening to the voices of those who have traditionally been excluded from having their perspectives heard and represented in schooling. What this will mean is the construction of a much more robust and profound understanding of how schooling is experienced by the most vulnerable groups of students and the teachers who work with them. It will also add significantly

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to understanding how the middle class institution of schooling works for some groups and not others, and will thus begin to address a major silence in the educational literature. With what focus? The kind of ethnographic focus being argued for here is one that acknowledges, recognizes and pursues what Gee (2000) refers to as the negotiation of ‘different socially situated identities’ (p. 413) among young people. In other words, the specific ways in which schools go about working with young people to ‘enact a socially situated identity’ (p. 413)*one that has distinctive ways of ‘thinking, believing, valuing, acting [and] interacting’ (p. 413). But as Gee has noted, not all young people are provided with access to the same social languages and literacies by schools, and this has quite profound consequences in terms of young people’s capacities to access the new knowledge economy. It is this ability of ethnographic studies to excavate how this differential identity work is enacted in, by and through schools, and the way schools connect youth to the new knowledge economy (or not), that offer the most exciting possibilities methodologically speaking. /

Who benefits, who gains and what is this alternative agenda? It is becoming increasingly clear that schools are places that are actively involved in a high stakes agenda of creating futures for some young people (while denying others), and in some respects schools have always done that. What has become radically different in the kind of capitalist world in which we now live is the ‘new work order’*and what Gee et al. (1996) argue is the dramatically changed role of schools in all of this. The central agenda is one of how schools are responding to the fluidity accompanying the new kind of identity formation necessary to successfully and prosperously inhabit these new times. Again, to invoke Gee (2000), the kind of relational resources and discourses that are necessary (indeed imperative) are of a kind that understands that: /

There are no discrete stable individuals, only ensembles of skills stored in a person, assembled for a specific project (to be reassembled for other projects), and shared with others within ‘communities of practice’ . . . Individuals are not defined by fixed essential qualities, such as intelligence, culture, or skill; rather they are (and must come to see themselves as) an ever-changing ‘portfolio’ of re-arrangeable skills acquired in their trajectory through ‘project space’*/all of the projects they have been involved with. (p. 414)

The significance of this for schools and young people is quite profound particularly around the three broad archetypes of workers that are emerging, namely: (a) ‘symbol analysts’*those who create and transform the knowledge systems within which we all live, and who are handsomely rewarded for their efforts; (b) ‘enchanted workers’*the poorly paid frontline service workers who perform the bulk of this /

/

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kind of new image management work, and who can be further rewarded through productivity gains, and who have to collaborate in order to get the work done and bring out the system re-designs; and (c) ‘backwater workers’*those who are paid a pittance, engage in peripheral, insecure, part-time, service (demeaning or manual) work, and who are easily dispensed with as and when needed. Understanding and exposing how schools operate to sustain, maintain or to occasionally interrupt these broader social and economic trajectories is the kind of project that ethnographic studies of schools should be concerning themselves with. None of this is to suggest, of course, that such studies on their own will be able to significantly alter the course of these wider forces, but they may serve the purpose of exposing what is going on, how, and with what effects. Surely this has to be the starting point for being able to construct at least some aspects of schooling in the direction of those being most actively excluded*well, at least that is the aspiration! /

/

By way of illustration I can best briefly illustrate the argument I have been making by reference to two recent research projects I have been leading in Australia that have been funded by the Australian Research Council: (a) Early school leaving in South Australia: listen to me, I’m leaving , 1997
2000; and (b) Teachers in the middle: reclaiming the wasteland of middle years of schooling , 2002
2005. They are a linked pair of studies in which the former engaged in some major excavations of the issues that have been pursued in more depth in the latter. Where the former employed ethnographic approaches to expose and understand the underside of a protracted and complex issue, the latter is a more conventional ethnography of a number of schools that are struggling with degrees of success in working out how best to assist young people to use schools to navigate a meaningful pathway for themselves. The impetus for the Early school leaving study came from a profound sense of unease some of us had about the alarming number of young people not completing the post-compulsory years (years 11 and 12) in Australia and the fact that educational policy directions seemed to be exacerbating rather than working to alleviate the problem. In the state of South Australia, apparent school retention rates had declined from a high of 92% in 1992 to 66.9% in 1997, and Australia-wide, the latter figure was not much better at 71%. Our concern was heightened by the inability of statistical studies to cast any light other than continue to map the tendencies. What was patently missing was anything about the existential reality of what was going on inside young lives that might explain this. In our view the only way to advance on this distressing issue was to engage in an exploratory study from the vantage point of the young people themselves about how they were constructing the issue of making the active decision to leave school early. The consequence was a study with 209 young people that employed a ‘voiced research’ approach (Smyth, 1999; Smyth & Hattam, 2001); the intent was to construct an account from their perspective. The overarching question that sustained the study and that could be

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understood and responded to by the young people was: ‘Tell us what was going on in your life at the time you decided to leave school’. While there is insufficient space to elaborate on the findings here, and these have been extensively reported elsewhere (Smyth et al., 2000; Smyth & Hattam, 2001, 2002; Hattam & Smyth, 2003; Smyth et al., 2003; Smyth et al., 2004; Smyth, in press), it might be helpful to present the guiding principles of what we labelled the ‘voiced research’ approach we used and that also informed our later Teachers in the middle study. Here are these principles in summary form: . starts from the position of seeking to include those who are marginalized or subjugated; . aims to give informants some agency; . believes that those who are normally excluded have interesting and valuable things to say; . works at providing a space in which informants can reveal what is ‘real’ for them; . seeks to challenge dominant views of who or what is defined as the problem; . regards theory as being built up dialectically, i.e. existing theory is transformed as a result of accessing informants’ lives, and informants’ lives are changed as a consequence of theorizing; . puts less emphasis on interviews as such and pursues instead ‘conversations with a purpose’ (Burgess, 1988) or ‘purposeful conversations’ (Smyth et al., 2004); . genuinely prepared to allow informants to develop a direction or line within the research that is consistent with their lives, aspirations and experiences; . willing to live with incoherence, lack of closure, provisionality, tentativeness, contradiction, paradox and ambiguity in order to represent complexity; . opportunity for informants to theorize out of their lives and experiences and to be activist readers of their own biographies and histories; . has an orientation that is about interrupting the habitual within the political status quo; . regards data as being ‘constructed’ or ‘spoken into existence’ rather than collected; . encourages forms of portrayal and representation that are unconventional and more consistent with how informants represent themselves; . is concerned about situating or locating the research in the wider global and geopolitical context; . makes no pretence to be neutral, objective or value-free and indeed may even be partisan and have a quasi-advocacy role; . acknowledges that we all have ‘knowledge interests’ (i.e. we are all ‘interested’ participants) and that these should be revealed and written into the research; and . believes in exposing how dominant viewpoints came to be constructed and the forces that work to keep them in place and make them seem normal, natural or invisible.

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While we learned many fascinating things in this study about what was going in young people’s lives, we also learnt much about ourselves as researchers and the research process. The Teachers in the middle study (Smyth & McInerney, in press), clearly a play on words dripping with ambiguity, was designed to build on our previous understandings substantively and methodologically. What we were trying to do in this study was to start from the position of investigating how some schools and teachers appeared to be reinventing themselves against the prevailing policy grain*measuremeasurement, testing, reporting student progress in terms of league tables, accountability and outcomes regimes, and consumerist mentalities. Our interest was in how these schools were working to create conditions of schooling that were hospitable to young people learning in meaningful ways. The kind of questions we were pursuing in this multi-sited ethnography (Marcus, 1998), were: /

. How is the school reinventing itself around an inclusive agenda in the middle years of schooling? . Who are the teachers who work with young adolescents? Why do they do it? . How do teachers reinvent themselves as teachers of young adolescents? . In what ways are they restructuring, reculturing and changing their pedagogy? . What are the attributes of such successful teachers? . What do they see as the rewards and frustrations? . How do they sustain the energy for this kind of work in a policy climate that appears largely inhospitable? . What are the tensions, contradictions and dilemmas involved in schooling young adolescents? . In particular, how do teachers handle the policy pressure to institutionalize relationships with students? (Smyth & McInerney, in press). At the core of the research in these case studies was an elaboration of the kind of ethnographic principles mentioned in relation to the Early school leaving study, and an extension of these around: . adopting and pursuing a sociological perspective on the issue of youth identity; . resurrecting the notion of social class which has largely been expunged from public discourse in Australia, and reinserting it along with gender, ethnicity and social justice an important explanatory educational category; . a much more pronounced emphasis on economic restructuring, unemployment and casualization of the workforce, rather than at-risk or ‘deficit’ students and their families as explanations, of why schools work or not for particular students; and . pursuit of how teachers and schools reinvent themselves in terms of creating the kind of ‘geographies of trust’ (Scott, 1999), necessary for high schools in particular, to be humane institutions for adolescents.

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What these ethnographies are beginning to reveal is that, contrary to the inhospitable and muscular regimes (even more pronounced in the USA with the emphasis on standards, high stakes testing, and enshrined in laws like No Child Left Behind), what works educationally for young adolescents looks vastly different, with varying degrees of emphasis on: . . . . . . . .

collaborative approaches to teaching and learning; alternatives to competitive assessment and reporting practices; integrating information and communication technologies into the curriculum; utilizing community resources and inter-agency support teams to support student learning; interdisciplinary approaches to the development of literacy, vocational education and higher order thinking skills; social learning, co-curricula programs, personal health and wellbeing; promoting student voice and identity, and fostering belongingness and positive relationships amongst students and teachers (Smyth & McInereny, in press).

Background and urgency As I have already suggested, teaching is incredibly complex work despite what some politicians say about it being merely technical work, susceptible to measurement, easily calibrated and codified, and having to be made transparent to the sovereignty of ‘clients’ and ‘customers’. As anyone who has been near a classroom in recent times can attest, teaching is about ‘deep moral tensions’ and ‘contradictory social values’ (Hutchinson, 1999, p. 7). Often the process of who benefits, who gets excluded, who gets ignored, who gets to be even more privileged, whose lives are denigrated or made invisible is not always that apparent in schools or classrooms. To tackle this, Hutchinson (1999) invokes Green’s (1991) notion of ‘unwrapping the ordinary’*making transparent things that we already know but fail to celebrate. The contrasts, contradictions, tensions and juxtapositions are all too familiar to anyone who inhabits or who regularly visits classrooms. Although somewhat dichotomous, the contrasts are worth reminding ourselves about because of the real questions they raise about how we pursue the explanations empirically through methods like ethnography. On the negative side: /

. . . students complain that school is boring, anonymous, the material is irrelevant, passive, no choice or self-direction, mean teachers, learning nothing, forgetting what was just memorized, being lectured at, only reading and writing, grades more important than anything, not being respected, unfair rules, test taking, and you know the rest! (Hutchinson, 1999, p. x)

On the other hand, we also know of the ‘positive and powerful’ effects of teaching too, as students experience it:

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J. Smyth . . . being known, teachers caring about you, relevant subject material, sense of belonging, hard work, fun, learning a lot, having choices, lively discussions, projects, the arts, critical thinking, finding a ‘voice’, having someone believe in you, connecting to the community and one’s family, talking about things that really matter. (Hutchinson, 1999, p. x)

Hutchinson argues that, while we as educators would all want the most exciting experiences for our students and while no teachers deliberately set out to inflict harm, there is a huge gap between aspiration and what happens and is experienced by students. We still have a long way to go before we fully understand ‘the everyday lived experience of how we ‘‘do’’ school’ (p. xi). The consequence is that at the moment ‘many of our students walk away feeling [left] on the margins of what happens in schools’ (Hutchinson, 1999, p. xi). The challenge is to better understand how meaning is being made by teachers of young people in schools, how the dignity of young people is being affirmed or denied, and which teachers produce learning environments that dominate and stifle, and which teachers inspire and produce learning conditions that are vibrant, lively and powerful. Hutchinson (2004) offers a set of questions that Meier (1995, p. 50) calls ‘a pedagogy of democratic narrative’ and that she used with her teachers in her role as principal to foster dialogue in an extraordinarily successful school in Harlem. Meier’s school used these dialogically in ways that permeated their pedagogy, curriculum and all that they did. They are helpful here too because of they way they give us some focus to how we might proceed ethnographically with teachers of young adolescents engaged in their project of ‘Becoming Somebody’ (Wexler, 1992): 1. How do you know what you know? (evidence) 2. From whose viewpoint is this being presented? (perspective) 3. How is this work or event connected to others (connection) 4. What if things were different? (supposition) 5. Why is this important? (relevance) or simply said, who cares? (Hutchinson, 2004, p. 85)

Clearly what is being alluded to here is how we might begin the complex task of accessing, unraveling, and revealing what Hutchinson (1999) refers to as ‘core stories’ that are deeply and richly embedded in the meaning teachers attach to how it is they work successfully with young lives in upholding and sustaining students’ dignity individually as well as socially. Such stories are ones that have the potential to go considerably beyond a description of job roles, teaching responsibilities, or chronologies of a teaching biography. Hutchinson’s (1999) summary of the features of ‘core stories’, and when applied to successful teachers of young adolescents, their capacity to reveal how it is teachers preserve dignity and overcome the forces of marginalization among the young, is informative and include: . . . first , that stories provide coherence and meaning to individual experience; second , that core stories represent a fiction of sorts, rather than historical fact; third , that they have a unique capacity to deal with . . . life experience, especially with ambiguities, contradictions, and breaks in the meaning of one’s experience; fourth , that the teller of

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the story must decide what is pertinent and tell the story in his or her own voice; fifth , that core stories enable one to render public one’s experience; sixth , that they create the possibility of counteracting cultural givens that may dominate one’s life and those of others; and seventh , that core stories are ever protean and transformational as life experience changes and the individual develops. (Hutchinson, 1999, p. 92)

Teachers of young adolescents are not a group that have been specifically, extensively or intensively investigated in respect of how they make meaning of their teaching, and this is despite the fact that the process of teaching young adolescents can be particularly challenging and harrowing (but also extremely rewarding) given what we know about the uniqueness of the very significant transitions young adolescents are involved in. The need for such investigations is often overlooked because teachers are presumed to be able to make the necessary adaptations. But we know little about how it is that teachers remake themselves, their orientations, and their pedagogy in dealing with the emotional, relational and dignity affirming nature of such teaching. These are a very special group of people and we need to know more about the identity work that goes on as they operate as frontline professionals in schools and classrooms. There is a very extensive literature around adolescence and adolescents, its troubling and contested nature, the accompanying moral panic, and the cultural forms of identity construction underway by young people. Yet we know little about the identity formation processes of the adults, particularly teachers, who have such a profound impact on young people. To take this a little further, we need to know more about what Holland et al. (1998) call ‘identity in practice’, or the ‘practiced identity’ (p. 272) of teachers of young adolescents. In other words, the durable qualities and predispositions by which teachers make and remake themselves and their teaching worlds, and how they work across the person/society connection to engage in a ‘suturing of the person to the social position’ (p. 270) of being a teacher of young adolescents. According to Holland et al. (1998), and when applied to teachers as in this instance, there are several aspects to identity formation. First, we need to know about the ‘figured world’ of such teachers, and specifically the ‘frames of meaning [within] which interpretations and human actions are negotiated’ (p. 271). And, given what we know about young adolescents, knowing more about how such cultural work among teachers is enacted is becoming a growing imperative. Second, we are also lacking in understanding of these teachers’ identity in respect of ‘positionality’ (p. 271)*that is to say, how they make sense of ‘power, status and rank’ (p. 271) within themselves and among others around them, and the absence or presence of accompanying resources with which to do this. Third, there is a silence too around the aspect of identity that for teachers has to do with ‘spaces for authoring’ (p. 272) in which they ‘orchestrate’ and construct responses to others’ interpretations, demands, and confusions around what it means to be a teacher. Finally, as is already becoming apparent, a teaching identity is not authored entirely independently, and we need to become more informed about the rituals and the process by /

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which teachers of young adolescents shuttle back and forth from ‘intimate to public spaces’ in ‘making worlds’ (p. 272) for themselves and the adolescents with whom they interact in their teaching. Teaching as improvisation There are a number of compelling reasons giving added impetus and urgency to ethnographically explore how teachers create the necessary ‘free spaces’ (MacIntyre, 1981) for themselves and their students. At issue is how teachers are going about giving visibility to alternative ‘social scripts’ (Giles, 2001, p. 135)*ones that are contrary to those currently being constructed by dominant social and cultural elites. What is at issue here is something as fundamental as the nature of teaching and learning, and whether either is amenable to the kind of social scripting currently being imposed by school reformers. Among the reasons we need to unpack the improvisational and much less tentative view of teaching and learning I am advocating are the following. First, there is the increasingly shrill deficit and pathologizing narratives, practices and discourses (Shields et al., 2005) being constructed by the mainstream media, the corporate and business sector, policy makers, and politicians. These groups would have us believe that young people are unruly, out of control, in need of increased containment, through pedagogical regimes that would script both learners and teachers in ways that keep them in their places. According to Shields et al. (2005): /

Pathologizing is a process where perceived structural-functional, cultural, or epistemological derivation from an assumed normal state is ascribed to another group as a product of power relationships, whereby the less powerful group is deemed to be abnormal in some way. Pathologizing is a mode of colonization used to govern, regulate, manage, marginalize, or minoritize primarily through hegemonic discourses. (p. 119)

We need to know more about this, and how teachers and students resist these scripted discourse and practices in schools and classrooms made for them by others. We also need insight into how teachers and young adolescents mediate, undermine and appropriate such policy trajectories in ways that minimize the worst excesses of their potentially damaging consequences. For example, the increasing attempts to portray student behaviour problems as deviant, through individualizing and privatizing them, ends up presenting such young people as ‘problem cases’ to be sedated through medicalization. As Herr (2005) put it, confronting ‘behaviour management policies’ that close down ‘conceptual critique and disagreement to a psychologized space’ (p. 21) that locates the problem in young people is sufficient cause to call for ethnographic research that questions and interrogates institutional structures themselves. Second, and in a more positive and constructive vein, ethnographic approaches have the potential to better inform us on how teachers and young adolescents jointly construct creative narratives of learning. In other words, far from being an activity that lends itself to easy scripting and codification, the pedagogy of working with

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young adolescents is much more about capturing the learning moment, especially in terms of what is currently relevant in young lives and what can be creatively and collaboratively capitalized upon in situ. Jeffrey (2003) expressed what I am referring to here as ‘the reconstruction of a relevant pedagogy for learners’ as teachers struggled ‘in the wake of more [policy] insistence on direct teaching and an increasingly prescriptive pedagogy’ (p. 490). Sawyer (2004) put in these terms: Creative teaching suggests a very different vision [from scripted teaching, in which] . . . teachers are [regarded as] knowledgeable and expert professionals, and are granted creative autonomy in their classrooms. (p. 12)

To speak of teaching in terms of improvisation is, therefore, to foreground the elements of the ‘unforeseen’ or unpredictable: In improvisation we are always ‘working off of’ one script or another, but we bring more of ourselves to the script when we allow the unforeseen, the unplanned, to well up from inside ourselves. (Giles, 2001, p. 135)

It is not that teachers work with young adolescents in completely unstructured ways, but rather that they do so in ways that amount to ‘disciplined improvisation because it always occurs within broad structures and frameworks’ (Sawyer, 2004, p. 13). The problem is that currently fashionable ‘performance’ metaphors, when applied to teaching young adolescents, ‘tend to suggest an overly scripted, planned perspective, with the teacher performing from a script*the lesson plan or the lecture . . . rather than [being derivative of] a collective focus on the entire classroom’ (p. 13). This is clearly a hierarchical view of teaching and learning with young adolescents which rests very uneasily with the lived democratic experience of many teachers. We need to understand more about the not so subtle hidden agenda in which scripted approaches attempt to ‘teacher-proof the curriculum by rigidly specifying teacher actions, and essentially removing all creativity and professional judgement from the classroom’ (Sawyer, 2004, p. 12). There are some complexities in here that need to be uncovered. Third, if we conceive of teaching in improvisational terms, then emphasis is rightly placed on ‘the interactional and responsive creativity of a teacher working together with a group of students’ (Sawyer, 2004, pp. 12
13)*something that is consistent with the highly relational nature of teaching young adolescents. What thus becomes particularly amenable to ethnographic exploration is the jointly constructed nature of teaching and learning, which: /

/

. . . is not scripted by the lesson plan or by the teacher’s predetermined agenda . . . [and amounts to a] collaborative emergence . . . [It is] emergent because the outcome cannot be predicted in advance, and . . . collaborative because no single participant can control what emerges; the outcomes is collectively determined by all participants. (Sawyer, 2004, p. 13)

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Teachers reinventing themselves Elsewhere I have argued that the teacher as improviser amounts to a trajectory that is more respectful and that accords them active agency. What this means, in contrast to the misplaced nostalgia of those who would have us return to some mythical golden age of schooling, is that teachers know intuitively that ‘the old script does not work’ (Smyth et al., 2003, p. 189). Trying to tightly orchestrate, institutionalize and constrain what goes on in the highly charged and emotionally unpredictable world of young adolescents is, to say the least, a highly fraught exercise. Something has to give, and more than likely it will be the lives of young people. My argument is that what constitutes rigor in teaching young people is vastly different to the contained, constrained and calibrated version we are being fed at the moment in educational reform agendas. A pedagogy with rigor involves: nurturing productive educative relationships between teachers and students; developing collaborative forms of teaching; promoting cooperative learning using small group methodology; negotiating significant aspects of course content and process with the students; and, designing integrated curriculum around themes that enable interdisciplinary approaches. (Smyth et al ., 2003, pp. 189
190)

The notion of teachers reinventing themselves suggests something far more radical than is being attempted by current school reforms. What I am suggesting is far more pervasive, and when thought about in contexts inhabited by young adolescents, it amounts to questioning the whole raison d’eˆtre of what it means to be a teacher. Meier (1992) expressed this in terms of the need for teachers to ‘relearn what it means to be good in-school practitioners’ (p. 594). Reinventing teaching will require a correspondingly respectful research approach, like that possible through ethnography. The complexities of what is involved are not insubstantial and would need to acknowledge the following kind of realities: We can change teaching only by changing the environment in which teaching takes place. Teaching can only be changed by reinventing the institutions within which teaching takes place*/schools. Reinvention has to be done by those who will be stuck in the reinvented schools. It cannot be force fed*/not to teachers, nor to parents and children. (Meier, 1992, p. 600) If teachers are not able to join in leading such changes, the changes will not take place. Politicians and policymakers at all levels may institute vast new legislated reforms; but without the understanding, support, and input of teachers, they will end up in the same dead end as . . . past reforms . . . For all the big brave talk, they will be rhetorical and cosmetic, and after a time they will wither away. (Meier, 1992, p. 594) The changes needed are not changes in the solo acts teachers perform inside their classrooms . . . We are talking about creating a very different school culture, a new set of relationships and ideas. (Meier, 1992, p. 599)

Teaching that is likely to work for young adolescents has to work against the current educational policy grain of: the competitive academic curriculum; outcomes-driven forms of educational measurements and reporting; externally imposed standards of

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what constitutes quality; and attempts to continually align teaching with the requirements of business and the economy. Herein lies the ethnographic challenge! What is to be gained from ethnographic research approaches? I want to start out in this section by placing at the centre of my discussion what is already widely known about the most prominent condition necessary for adolescent learning. It can be summed up in a single word: ‘respect’. Repeatedly we hear from young adolescents that when the institution of schooling fails them, or does not work for them, it is because of the absence of respect and care, from teachers, peers, the school, and the wider community. In other words, the crucial bridging mechanism necessary for student engagement and hence learning is either missing or has been severely corroded, sometimes as a direct consequence of deliberate educational or social policies. More generally, when people feel they have been mal-treated, damaged or left behind by social institutions they often attribute it to ‘lack of respect’. Sociologist Richard Sennett (2003) argues that when people respond in this way it amounts to a statement that they feel a lack of recognition, as if their presence is rendered invisible or erased. Such responses are not innocent either because this ‘scarcity of respect’ is ‘man-made’ (p. 4). As he puts it: When society treats the mass of people in this way, singling out only a few for recognition, it creates a scarcity of respect, as though there were not enough of the precious substance to go around. (p. 4)

The problem as Sennett (2003) describes it is that ‘modern society lacks positive expressions of respect and recognition for others’; however ‘by treating one another as equals we affirm mutual respect’ (p. xv). According to Sennett (2003), respect is a difficult term to define*it has to do with attentiveness, mutuality, recognition, honour and the ‘erasure of social boundaries and distance’ (p. 55). According to him, respect involves more than simply removing unjust inequalities. ‘Mutuality requires expressive work’ in which the difficult, demanding and obscure ‘acts which convey respect’ (Sennett, 2003, p. 59) are made overt. My reason for invoking the notion of respect at all here is that it seems to be the social glue providing the nexus between what is required in teaching and learning, especially when there are large inequalities or social distances between students, teachers, and the social institution of schooling. Similarly, respect seems also to be a crucial ingredient required of researchers who are trying to understand how the mysteries of teaching and learning are accomplished in schools and classrooms. If researchers are to access in a meaningful way the still largely private and secret world of teachers and students then they will have to do it in ways that acknowledge the importance of acting respectfully. Elsewhere I have described what this might look like as ‘an epistemologically respectful paradigm’ (Smyth, 2004a). I see this more respectful approach as being consistent with the ‘new educational ethnography’ described by Foley et al. (2000
2001). Educational anthropologists /

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like Foley et al. (2000
2001) are indicative of a ‘new generation of socially critical researchers’ who see their role primarily in terms of contributing knowledge for the benefit of students and teachers, and they pursue this through ‘insider studies’ or ‘insider ethnographies’ (Foley et al., 2000
2001, p. 37). The impetus for these insider ethnographies derives from the ‘border crossing’ work of ‘halfie anthropologists’*ethnic researchers ‘with strong ties to and a propensity to study ethnographically*their national cultures of origin’ (Foley et al., 2000
2001, p. 83). The defining feature of such studies lies in the way ‘they construct insider ethnographic knowledge using conceptual tools from the academy, and they present this knowledge in a way that renders their subjects’ actions and beliefs comprehensible and sympathetic to outsiders and insiders alike’ (Foley et al., 2000
2001, p. 37). The crucial importance of these studies lies in their agenda of regarding insider contributions as ‘bring[ing] . . . to light the dynamics of culture that may lead to the design of more democratic educational arrangements and hence the attainment of greater educational opportunity and achievement’ (Foley et al., 2000
2001, p. 37). In other words, ‘enriching our understanding of educational processes and enhancing our ability to make progressive changes in educational practice’ (Foley et al., 2000
2001, p. 38). At the centre of this new insider ethnography lies ‘a respectful emphasis on the meanings that insiders attribute to their own behavior . . .’ and, even when done by people who are technically outsiders, the overwhelming intent is ‘to sensitively and sympathetically portray insider knowledge’ (Foley et al., 2000
2001, p. 40). Pollard and Filer (1999) describe this appropriately as ‘appreciative ethnography’ (p. 154) because of the way this approach both ‘hears’ and empathizes with the perspective of actors and takes them seriously in the analysis of evidence. Ethnographic research of this kind has a capacity to provide new directions in several ways, by: /

/

. . . . . .

positioning the ‘problem’ as involving the reclamation of teaching; providing legitimation for teachers’ forms of knowledge; articulating a more respectful and trustworthy view of teachers’ work; providing ways of unraveling the complexity of teachers’ lives and work; providing teachers with a way of appropriating policy; and regarding teachers as cultural constructors of their work, rather than other people’s technicians (Smyth, 2004a, p. 274).

Invoking Goffman’s (1967) notion of ‘where the action is’, Smardon (2005) points to ‘the microsociological turn in educative research’ with its ‘renewed focus on face-toface interaction’ (p. 20) as holding out the possibility of casting light on the kind of issues I have raised here. While there are echoes here of earlier notions of microethnography, there are also some important new advances over earlier work in the way political and socially critical dimensions are attended to. What Smardon (2005) regards as significant about these new and ‘creative directions’, especially as exemplified in recent work by people like Erickson (2004) and Collins (2004), is

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the scope it provides for moving beyond some of the ‘traps laid by overly deterministic post-structural theory’ (Smardon, 2005, p. 20) and the possibility of building more meaningful theory starting from face-to-face interactions. In other words, the pursuit of forms of social analysis around schooling in which ‘social actors are both constrained and enabled by social structures’ (p. 21). Educational ethnographic next steps? Connell (1996) captured the point I have arrived at in this paper when he said of good teaching that it ‘involves a gift relation . . . It is founded on a public rather than a private interest’ (p. 6): Teachers’ work involves constant improvisation . . . In good teaching, the improvisation goes beyond the boundaries; there is a (benign) excess; an enthusiasm or concern, a capacity to judge the right moment which sparks a learning process, inspires a pupil, or communicates a love for knowledge and a respect for the learner. (p. 5)

If, as Connell (1996) argues, education is both ‘a social process and a creative process’ (p. 5) involving the constitution of a social relationship between teacher and learner, then what we are dealing with through educational relationships in schools and classrooms is the creation of a new set of capacities that cover: . . . the full range of types of social action; productive capacities , used in economic life; symbolic capacities , used in making culture; capacities for collective decision making used in politics; and capacities for emotional response , used in personal life. (Connell, 1996, p. 5, emphases in original)

Starting out by regarding teaching, especially that with young adolescents as being primarily relational work, enables us to begin to pursue what an ‘ethnographic imagination’ (Willis, 2000) of teachers’ work might look like. In that regard, it will begin by acknowledging Walford’s (2003) minimal requirements of ethnography in which ‘policy, curriculum and pedagogy interact with teachers, learners, parents and communities’ (Jeffrey, 2004, p. 2), in which there is: 1. a focus on the study of culture; 2. use of multiple methods and thus the construction of diverse forms of data; 3. direct involvement and long-term engagement; 4. recognition that the researcher is the main research instrument; 5. high status given to the accounts of participants and their understandings; 6. engagement in a cycle [of] hypothesis and theory building; and [a] 7. focus on a particular case rather than on any attempts to generalise (Walford, 2003, p. 4).

Keeping in mind Walford’s constellation of elements could be helpful in exploring the question of what is occurring in/around the teaching of young adolescents. The case for a reinvigorated ethnography of teaching could not be more urgent or more timely. With escalating numbers of young people physically and intellectually switching off, disengaging and dropping out of schools in unprecedented numbers

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around the western world, we desperately need better ways of understanding the processes for re-suturing social relationships*and public schools and classrooms are still our best hope of doing that (Smyth, 2004b). With commentators regularly estimating levels of student disengagement in the US to be exceeding ‘two-thirds of the high school population’ (Cothran & Ennis, 2000, p. 106) and ‘dropout’ rates of 50% for blacks, Latino and Native American students (Orfield, 2004), there is clearly more than a passing collective curiosity around what can be done about this in ways that connect to the broader societal issue described by people like Putnam (2000; Putnam et al., 2003) as a depletion of social capital in ‘democracies in flux’ (Putnam, 2002). As I alluded to earlier, ‘the old script’ of traditional pedagogies are not working with young adolescents, and more engaging alternatives have to be embraced. That is to say: /

. . . where teachers are so constrained by the competitive academic curriculum that there is little room for students to break back into the script, then teaching becomes ‘defensive’ as teachers unintentionally develop relationships with students that are highly institutionalized. (Smyth et al ., 2003, p. 198)

What is required in contrast to educationally fundamentalist reforms being orchestrated and inflicted on schools at the moment around the mantra of standards, achievement, testing, accountability, and choice is ethnographic research into the formation of a different kind of teacher: . . . one committed to strengthening democratic relationships with students, and undoing the institutionalization of the teacher
student relationship demanded by adherence to the competitive academic curriculum. (Smyth et al ., 2003, p. 198)

While by no means new, the kind of questions we need answers to from extensive ‘multi-sited ethnographic’ (Marcus, 1998) research includes the following: . Why are so many students alienated by and switching off school? . Why is the ‘dropout’ rate so high amongst working class and minority students? . What is happening inside young lives when they decide to disengage or leave school? . How do successful teachers reinvent themselves against the policy hostility? . How is it that some teachers are able to overcome the barriers to re-engaging students? . What processes do these teachers use to enlarge the cultural map of their relationships with young people? . How are the necessary forms of ‘indigenous’ leadership and reculturing of schools created and sustained? . How do schools and teachers develop a ‘critical mass’ committed to such changes? It may turn out to be the case that while this sounds like a daunting project it may not be as formidable as it seems at first sight. I return to the words of Green (1991) that I started out with in this paper; we need to have the humility to ‘unwrap the ordinary’.

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What this will entail is developing a certain naivete´ and with it a capacity ‘to simply take notice of what we know already, but persist in overlooking’ (p. 103). We will certainly require the courage of our professional convictions to take a stand against the blatantly nonsensical. But, in the end, our schools will only become more humane places for young people if ethnographic research helps us to develop better ways of ‘making evident what we already know, but may have overlooked’ (p. 84). Acknowledgements The work here is specifically attributable to the author’s multiple institutional affiliations as: Roy F & Joann Cole Mitte Endowed Chair in School Improvement, College of Education, Texas State University-San Marcos; Professorial Fellow, University of Ballarat; Adjunct Professor, School of Education, Charles Darwin University; Visiting Professor, Wilf Malcolm Institute for Educational Research, University of Waikato, New Zealand. The author expresses his grateful appreciation to the Mitte Foundation and the Australian Research Council for support.

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