Newsgroups: bit.listserv.qualrs-l
Date:         Tue, 7 Apr 1992 16:23:06 +1000
              <QUALRS-L@UGA.BITNET>
From:         Chris.Bigum@DEAKIN.OZ.AU
Subject:      Schooling the future
Comments: To: QUALRS-L@uga.cc.uga.edu

This is a posting that describes a project currently underway in Victoria,
Australia.  There may be folk with similar interests who would like to share
some of their thinking on the matters raised in this synopsis, either on this
list or directly.


SCHOOLING THE FUTURE:

An ethnographic account of information culture and student experience
 in the context of the Victorian Certificate of Education#

Lindsay Fitzclarence, Richard Bates, Chris Bigum, Bill Green, Rob Walker
Faculty of Education
Deakin University

November, 1991

The Project involves an ethnographic investigation of specific instances of
the culture of contemporary schooling, focussing in particular on the
relationship between knowledge frames and student experience in the
post-compulsory educational context.  It has been conceived as the grounded
research phase in a more comprehensive explanation of the emergent educational
culture of postmodernity, specifically focussed on developing a profile of the
'postmodern' student/subject.  It seeks to do this by bringing together
methodologies drawn from cultural studies and critical ethnography.  The
study's likely significance lies in its critical analysis of current
educational rhetoric concerning school retention rates and the nature of
contemporary youth, with regard to the perceived relation among education, the
labour market, and changing sociocultural conditions, as well as its recasting
of various educational research problematics in critical-postmodernist terms.

1.

A number of recent education reports have focussed on the issue of school
retention rates1. In particular, attention has been increasingly paid to
retention rates in what has been called the  'post compulsory phase' of
schooling, that is, the senior secondary years2.  The different reports have
particularly highlighted the problem of the relationship between education and
employment in the workforce.  The link between education and training for the
workforce has come to the fore in many debates about the structure  and nature
of educational provision.  In particular, concern about the changing character
of the labour market and Australia's status as a successful, independent,
marketing nation in the world economy has caused much interest in the nature
and structure of the senior secondary school curriculum.  More specifically,
concern about links between the economy and science-technology has brought the
school curriculum into sharper administrative focus.

Recently, analysis of the relationship among education, culture and the
workforce has started to question the adequacy of many of the dominant
assumptions framing consideration of retention rates and post-compulsory
schooling.  Instead of thinking about this issue in quantifiable terms, the
debate has started to shift into consideration of the changing social
formation, and in particular of the specific profile of the type of student
entering this phase of schooling.  That is, what do we know, and need to know,
about the subjects of policy and pedagogy?  Such enquiry has opened the way to
critical-reconceptualist examination of the sociocultural conditions which
have brought the retention rate issue into consideration in the first place.
For example, in noting increasing tensions produced by the influx of such a
wide range of students into a phase of schooling which has traditionally been
characterised by the 'competitive academic curriculum', Johnston has argued
that

The way forward must rely on structural curriculum reform, rather than placing
the blame on the students, and requires a re- examination of the total
curriculum as well as of the total school environment and organization.  This
must take place with a firm grasp of the nature of the client population in
the upper secondary school and the broader societal context in which the
school and its clients exist.  There must be more sensitivity to the needs of
the broad range of students who now comprise this school client group and
there must be a commitment on the part of school personnel that all these
needs are legitimate and must be met in a valid way.  This requires a new way
of looking at the upper secondary school  and a willingness to be critical,
honest and open in challenging assumptions and values on which past and
current thinking is based3.

In this comment, Johnston indicates that the changing senior school population
produces a new set of 'needs' which must be catered for within the curriculum.
Other recent analysts have developed have developed this line of thinking. For
example, Scott has notes a number of factors associated with the emergence of
new student cohorts in the  senior secondary curriculum.  Drawing on the
discussion paper Social and Demographic Issues Affecting Secondary Education
4, he argues that a number of factors have combined to change the profile of
the student group from previous times5.  For example, the impact of new
patterns of immigration, changing attitudes and structures of the family,
changing attitudes and patterns of gender roles, changing attitudes to the
concept of disability, together with changed expectations to entering the
labour market, have all helped produce a new type of student. It is
specifically this insight which we have wanted to work with in this study. In
particular, we are interested in developing a better understanding of a notion
increasingly visible in the research noted here;  that is, the emergence of
what may well be a distinctively new type of student, with new needs, new
interests and new capacities.  This immediately raises questions about the
nature and composition of contemporary youth, and suggests further the need to
draw upon recent research developments in the area of youth studies and
related forms of cultural studies.  Within this tradition, one recent
commentator has described the task of theorising youth, particularly in the
contemporary situation, as one of striking complexity, involving

... a particular affective context which plays an important determining role
in how youth is constructed and lived. However, even this contextPPfashionably
referred to as 'post modernity'PPis not sufficient to understand youth's
behavior.  If youth lives in post modernity, it also lives in many other
places and contexts.  Our interpretation of youth's behavior must recognize
the contradictions generated out of real historical complexity6.

As Grossberg and others in the cultural studies tradition have argued, the
social and discursive construction of youth involves a complex of forces,
including but not certainly limited to the experience of schooling (c.f.
Roman, Christian-Smith and Ellsworth, 1988).   Among these forces and factors
are peer-group culture, mass media, rock music and drug culture, among other
subcultural considerations.

This brings us, therefore, to what has been our primary research question.
Are schools now dealing with a student who is quite different to students of
previous eras?   A subordinate question is:   Have schools and educational
authorities developed curriculum rationales on  what are essentially
inadequate and even obsolete assumptions about the nature of students?   Once
again Johnston has neatly expressed the  issues raised by these questions:

Throughout this paper, there have been references to fine examples of research
which have provided insights into the educational needs and problems of girls
and boys who are now remaining at school in the post-compulsory years.
However the field is still relatively new and many issues emerge which require
further  research and clarification.  The weaknesses inherent in relying on
composite pictures built from statistical data have been exposed.  Head counts
and numerical data do little to accurately portray the experiences of and
problems faced by girls and boys which limit their life chances.  It has been
argued that the high overall retention rates of girls in post- compulsory
schooling obscure the reality of the situation.  These high retention rates
have been used to justify existing, outmoded policies and practices.  Beneath
the numbers lies a situation which requires urgent and radical rethinking7.

Johnston's call for rethinking the assumptions behind the retention rate issue
is central to the the project in question here. That is, we have endeavoured
to focus directly the importance of the need for new forms of analysis
providing insights into the distinctive experience of the so-called
'postmodern student'.  The term 'postmodern' is one we take from an increasing
body of contemporary debate within social and cultural theory.  It is employed
here because it  acts as a marker for what is argued to be a new intensity of
social change, in terms of which both individual subjectivity and wider forms
of social relations are in the process of undergoing  significant
transformation.  In posing our research questions, we have informed by an
increasing volume of literature which has begun exploring the idea of cultural
transformation as a process involving new forms of social relations at many
levels, from micro and proximal through to macro and distant.  Writers such as
Lyotard, Baudrillard and Jameson, and more recently Hinkson, Poster and
Harvey, have argued for the particular significance of new developments in
science and technology, information culture, and the forms of knowledge and
its control.  This work relates directly to various postmodernist initiatives
in epistemology and culture, for instance in the work of figures such as
Derrida and Lacan.  Other writers have developed similar labels to help
designate the nature of social and cultural transformation which has been
noted here.  For example, Bell has discussed the 'post industrial society',
Debord the 'society of the spectacle', and Sharp the 'society of increasing
abstraction'.

Collectively, the work of these various writers points towards consideration
of the elements at stake in promoting the emergence of a paradigmatic cultural
shift.  At a theoretical level, the debates in social theory which developed
via the work of the writers noted here throws into question many of the
central informing assumptions in modern forms of social planning.  In
particular, the work of postmodernist writers has acted to undermine some of
the  claims central to the scientific and political projects which have
developed since the Enlightenment.  For example, the 'metanarrative'
frameworks associated with positivistic scientific and industrial developments
have been called into question.  The legitimacy of binary thinking, in
particular, has come under challenge.  Accordingly, the very idea of a binary,
linear association between subject and objectPPfor instance, the often assumed
correspondence between the person as 'subject' and society as 'object'PPhas
been unsettled.  This means that, among other things, the future cannot be
read off a simple teleological relation to the present, including current
forms of schooling.  In more specific terms, this work insists on
reconsideration of the link between education and wider social structures,
such as the workforce and, increasingly, the contexts of leisure and
consumption.  It  therefore calls into question the very legitimacy of many of
the assumptions on which the modern curriculum has been constructed.  The idea
that there can be a direct correspondence between the student and the stable
world of 'real' knowledges and social structures has been challenged by
postmodernist critiques.  Thus the notion of serial development and progress
along a straight and clear route, which many educational frameworks tend to
assume, has been brought into question8.

The urgent problem that confronts both policy and pedagogy, as we see it, is
two-fold.  Firstly, how is it possible to suggest specific forms of education
provision when the relationship between school and the furture cannot be
predicted or even planned for, in the current-traditional manner?  In
theoretical terms, what is the relationship between the present subject of
schooling and the social subject of the future?  Secondly, and relatedly, to
what extent is it possible to gear educational provision towards the present
subject of schooling, when it is unclear how the subject is itself composed?
That is, to what extent is the contemporary student assimilable to the student
subjectivities of past eras and forms of schooling, and how might this present
subject be described in all her complexity and difference?  Hence, our concern
to develop, via ethnography and discourse analysis, a profile of the
contemporary student as postmodern subject.

A further consideration, then, is the relationship between student experience
and identity, on the one hand, and what we describe as information culture, on
the other.  By the latter term, we are referring specifically to the culture
of postmodernity, noting that various social theorists argue for the
particular and increasing significance of the category 'information'PPand
relatedly, the 'image'PPin shaping a new social order and establishing new
forms of cultural logic, of the kind increasingly captured in the term
'postmodernity'.  Part of what is at issue here is taking proper account of
the fact that the student constituency of schooling remains structured
according to longstanding patterns of social difference, along lines of class,
gender, race and other factors.  In addition, however, consideration needs to
be made increasingly of of students' access to the complex cultures of
information and technology, as well as their patterns of consumption and usage
in this regard.  Hence, it becomes possible to make distinctions between
'information-rich' and 'information-poor' considerations in the (re)production
of student identity, as something needing to be taken into explicit account in
both policy and pedagogy.  This not only involves understanding 'information'
itself as a new form of cultural capital, but also raises specific questions
about the relationship between information culture and student experience, to
do with students' increasing lack of 'fit', as it might be described, with
current-traditional frameworks and discursive regimes of schooling.

It has been our intention, therefore, to develop a study designed to explore
the idea that a new type of student is both product of, and contributor to, a
significant cultural shift, with important implications for educational
research and pedagogical practice.  The study accordingly has undertaken to
examine the postmodern student-subject ,with reference to the specific context
of the senior secondary curriculum.  Together with longitudinal studies of a
small selection of students passing through the senior phase of schooling,
however, we believe that it is also important to take into account both the
teachers involved in the programsPPas themselves subjects of schoolingPPand
that education context which has most direct interface with the senior
secondary school, namely, the university setting.

The specific focus of the study is the new Victorian Certificate of Education.
This has been chosen as a focus because it can be seen as containing many of
the tensions signalled by recent  debates in social theory.  Policy relating
to the Certificate starts by acknowledging significant cultural developments
and the need for reconsideration of assumptions about the nature of the
student at the post-compulsory phase;  however, it also maintains dominant
assumptions about the relationships among education, the workforce, and other
wider social structures. Hence, we find statements such as the following:

Victoria is now at a turning point in its educational provision for those who
have reached the end of compulsory schooling... Changed circumstances and
expectations in society at large have eroded the historical basis on which the
system was built, making radical changes urgent9.

and:

The VCE will be introduced because of the need to provide improved educational
programs for the whole range of students remaining at or returning to
educational post-compulsory levels.  It is also intended that it should
attract a large number of students10.

As a primary site for study, then, we have chosen to focus on a selection of
students working through the initial years of the Victorian Certificate of
Education, which was introduced in 1991.  Our selection to date has been based
on our concern with the declared aspirations of the curriculum designers to
produce a form of education more in keeping with an expanded interpretation of
the post-compulsory phase of schooling.  Building on the Blackburn Report (the
Ministerial Review of Post Compulsory Schooling), the VCE has taken the ideas
of 'access' and 'success' as a platform for reforming the  senior secondary
curriculum specifically to cater for an expanded cohort of students.  The
notion of a 'comprehensive' curriculum, including optional and common studies,
addressed the need for what has been described as an 'inclusive' curriculum;
that is, one which  catered for a diverse population of students, with a
plurality of capacities and needs. In essence the Blackburn Report attempted
to address concerns about two kinds of change:  on the one hand, as regards
students, and on the other, with regard to context.  Accordingly, the VCE in
building on Blackburn's insights provides a unique opportunity to study an
attempt to structure a curriculum based on a new vision of both students and
schooling in general.

2.

Johnston has argued that 'at the school and system level, much can be done to
build a more accurate picture of the educational pathways followed by male and
female students"11.  The metaphor of 'pathway' is particularly informative
because it suggests a study format designed to glean information about both
the student and the social context12.  Following the logic of the
postmodernist critiques, however, we have not not assumed that a pathway of
life within a curriculum phase would be a linear formation.  Instead, it is
recognised that a pathway could well turn out to something that twists and
turns and intersects with other  cultural influences and directional options.
For this reason, a methodological framework which allows for a composite image
of life, in and out of school, requires a particular form of qualitative
research, drawing in particular on methodologies from cultural studies and
critical ethnography.  This involves a speculative theory approach, in which
theoretical refinement is built  from the ground up, according to the images
provided by a range of data-collection approaches.  Strauss describes the
notion of 'grounded theory' as including '... a style of doing qualitative
analysis that includes a number of distinct features, such as theoretical
sampling, and certain methodological guide-lines, such as making of constant
comparisons and the use of a coding paradigm, to ensure conceptual development
and density'13.   Building on the methodological insights and practices
associated with the notions of grounded theory and 'thick description', our
concern has been the following:

* 	Identify which textual representations have most significance in
influencing choices and behaviours of students and teachers.
* 	Illustrate how these representations as curriculum materials ('texts') are
consumed by participants in the program ( students and teachers)
* 	Investigate the out-of-school experiences and textual representation deemed
significant by students in influencing their behaviour.
* 	Identify key turning points for determining new directions in influencing
students' self-production.

As noted previously, the methodology for the study has largely been drawn from
contemporary work in cultural studies and critical ethnography.  Of particular
significance in this work is its increasing engagement with theoretical and
methodological issues directly linked to the notion of 'postmodernism' (e.g.
Lather, Roman, Hall, Grossberg, Hebdige, McRobbie, Johnson).  In essence, it
involves bringing together ethnography and other forms of naturalistic,
empirically-based research with discourse analysis and related forms of
textual studies.  Accordingly, the study has conceived as primarily an
ethnographic investigation of selected senior secondary schools, as well as
selected courses in a pre-service primary teacher education programme, with
particular attention to be given to cultural analysis and 'discourse
critique'14.  Schools and classrooms, as well as other relevant cultural
sites, are conceived as sites of 'textually-mediated discourse', in Dorothy
Smith's (1988) formulation;  hence, due regard needs to be given to the
relationship between 'lived culture' and 'commodified culture', and hence to
those social relations and social practices organized around and by texts of
various kinds.

The main work of the study involves extended fieldwork in two high schools in
the Geelong area, chosen on the basis of their different student and cultural
constituency.  In addition, ethnographic research of various kinds has been
initiated in the undergraduate pre-service teacher education program in the
Faculty of Education at Deakin University.

3.

In summary, then:  The work of the Project focusses on the emergence of what
is postulated to be a distinctively new kind of student identity, in
accordance with decisively changed and changing socioeconomic and cultural
conditions, and a new social form organized around electronic culture and the
principles of information and the image.  Within a general concern for
'schooling the future', understood in essence as a matter of teaching with and
for difference, research has begun on the task of recognizing and
understanding contemporary school populations in terms of postmodern
subjectivity, and hence the emergence of 'a new kind of student-person, with
changing capacitities, desires, uncertainties and priorities' (Fitzclarence,
1990).  These are early days as yet.  However, we believe that already we can
see new possibilities emerging for educational theory and practice from the
work to date, as well as the basis for a general critique of postmodern
educational culture.

#   This text forms the basis of a somewhat more elaborated Research Report
currently in preparation under the title 'Schooling the Future?
Post-Compulsory Schooling and the Postmodern StudentPPA Research Report',
written by Lindsay Fitzclarence and Bill Green.

1  See for instance J. Ainley and M. Batten.(1984), Patterns of Retention in
Australian Government Schools, A.C.E.R., Melbourne;  J. Abbott-Chapman, P.
Hughes and C Wyld (1986), Australian Secondary Education Project:
Participation and Retention Rates and Social and Educational Factors which are
related to them in Australia, University of Tasmania, Hobart;  Department of
Employment, Education and Training, (1987), School Leavers Research,
Statistics Branch, Canberra;  Commonwealth Schools Commission (1987), In the
National Interest:  Secondary Education and Youth Policy in Australia,
Canberra Publishing and Printing Co., Canberra;  Department of Employment,
Education and Training (1988), Taking Part:  Educational Participation in the
1980s, Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra;  S. Johnston
(1989), Retention RatesPPThere's More To It Than Just Counting Heads, The
Department of Employment, Education and Training, Canberra...
2 See for example:  Ministry of Education, Victoria ( 1985),Ministerial Review
of Post Compulsory Schooling, Melbourne;  Department of Education, New South
Wales ( 1989), Schools Renewal. Sydney;  Department of Education, Queensland,(
1989), The Corporate Vision for Senior Schooling in Queensland. Brisbane;
Department of Education, South Australia ( 1988), Education and Change in
South Australia. Adelaide.
3Johnston, S.  (1989)  Retention RatesPPThere is more to it than just counting
heads, op. cit., p. 52.
4 Social and Demographic Issues Affecting Secondary Education
5 Scott, D.( 1989) Towards a Reformed Senior Secondary Curriculum  Deakin
University, Master of Education unpublished Research Paper
6Grossberg, L. "Rockin' with Regan, or the Mainstreaming of Postmodernity"
Cultural Critique no 10 fall 1988, p. 125.
7Johnston, S  op. cit., p. 68
8 An increasing amount of educational scholarship has been influenced by the
debaters noted here. it is not possible to list the full scope of this
literature. A suitable sample of generative papers includes;
 Lather, P. Post modernism and the politics of Enlightenment, forthcoming.
Smith, D. Modernism, postmodernism and the future of pedagogy, A paper
prepared under the auspices of the Canadian Studies Program, Institute of East
and West Studies, Yonsei University.
White, D. 'Theorizing the Post modern Curriculum'. Melbourne Studies in
Education 1987-88, David Stockley ( ed) La Trobe University Press, Bundoora,
1989.
Luke,A, and Luke, C., 'School knowledge as simulation: curriculum in
postmodern conditions'.  Discourse, 1990 ( forthcoming)
Giroux, H (Guest Editor), Special Issue:  'Schooling for the Postmodern Age',
Boston University Journal of Education, Vol.170, No.3, 1988.
9  Ministry of Education, Victoria ( 1985)  Ministerial Review of Post
Compulsory Schooling, op. cit., p. 3
10 Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Board. The VCAB Newsletter.- Developing
the Victorian Certificate of Education Options Paper - Summary. March 1987
11Johnston, S. op. cit., p. 69
12 the issue of dialectic of student and context draws on the structuration
theory of Anthony Giddens. see Central Problems of Social Theory
13 Strauss, A. Qualitative Analysis for Social Scientists. Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge, 1987.
14  We take this latter term from Luke and Baker, who propose it as a new
research focus for criticical-sociological and postmodernist work in the area
of reading pedagogy;  however, it is likely to be appropriate for studies of
this kind as well.  See Chapter 11:  "Postscript:  Discourses and Practices",
in Allan Luke and Carolyn D. Baker (eds), Towards a Critical Sociology of
Reading Pedagogy, John Benjamins Publishers, Amsterdam, 1991.
Comments: Gated by NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU