title: Exploring the enablers and constraints of engaging with capabilities-based learning in secondary schools: A bounded-case narrative study
Creators: name: Baker, Rebecca
Publisher: name: Griffith University
Year: 2024
Subjects: subject: Australian curriculum
subject: pedagogical change
subject: practice architectures
subject: educational policy

description: This narrative inquiry explores the enablers and constraints of engaging with capabilities-based learning in South Australian secondary schools. It centres on the experience of pedagogical change for two teachers as they design and deliver a new elective subject for their school to primarily focus on developing assessable capabilities in students, rather than disciplinary content and skills. The study is bounded in a specific educational context for South Australia, at a time when the board governing the South Australian Certificate of Education (The SACE) have an active reform agenda which includes exploring a learner profile style certificate to "formally recognise" (SACE, n.d.-e) a Year 12 graduates' capabilities alongside their academic achievement (SACE, 2019). Currently in both the Australian Curriculum and The SACE, capabilities are embedded in the curriculum, developed through each subject's discipline content (ACARA, 2012). They are not subject or discipline-specific and are not currently assessed (ACARA, 2012; SACE, 2015). The SACE Board's exploration signals a potential repositioning to an explicit focus on the development and assessment of capabilities; requiring new pedagogies and approaches to learning design and assessment. This change also sits within a broader reform agenda focussed on a national scale; which is questioning the validity of the current senior secondary curricula and certification methods to meet the needs of young people in a 21st-century world (Learning Creates, 2023; Lucas &amp; Smith, 2018; Milligan et al., 2020; Milligan et al., 2022; O'Connell, 2019; Shergold et al., 2020). However, within the research connected to this reform agenda, little attention has been focused on the implications for teachers or how school environments can support them in implementing these priorities in their practice. Teachers are the central actors in implementing education policy and curriculum as mediators between these conceptual educational goals and their students (Grootenboer et al., 2020; Remillard &amp; Heck, 2014). Therefore, we must understand what this change represents for teachers' pedagogical practice, and accordingly, what conditions need to be present in schools' practice architectures (Kemmis &amp; Grootenboer, 2008) to support such a change. The study is grounded in the premise that the significance of capabilities is firmly established in Australian educational policy, yet their implementation within a multi-dimensional curriculum model has proven to be challenging (Moss, 2019). Grounded primarily in the general capabilities of the Australian Curriculum, this narrative inquiry occurs in response to this reform context. The narratives of two teachers, designing and delivering this new capabilities-based elective forms a single bounded case for this inquiry. Their stories provide insight into how they make sense of their own pedagogical change and how the school environment influences their actions. A theoretically driven thematic analysis is used to situate the teachers' stories of change within the broader literature, informed by a review of the literature on curriculum policy enactment, school reform, teacher agency and models of pedagogical change. The research shows that the enablers and constraints of engaging with capabilities-based learning are two sides of the same coin. The study's key findings highlight the crucial role of teachers' beliefs, self-efficacy, and willingness to engage with change in enabling capabilities-based learning. The study shows that teachers must be learners themselves, actively engaging the same capabilities as their students, highlighting that a teacher's ability to collaborate, reflect, and innovate is a key enabler. Creating supportive conditions within schools, grounded in trust, alignment and teacher agency is crucial to fostering an environment where teachers feel safe to experiment, and students are co-owners of the learning design. The study shows that designing new learning environments to explicitly evidence capabilities is enabled when contextual to the school. Ensuring the material, cultural, and interpersonal conditions support the adoption of new practices can enable teachers' engagement. The study shows that these same enabling factors are the constraints when absent in a school environment; therefore, careful attention to addressing the right cultural conditions for change is vital in enabling capabilities-based learning in secondary schools.