Diluting education? An ethnographic study of change in an Australian Ministry of Education

Abstract

This ethnographic study captures the processes that led to change in an Australian public education system. The changes were driven by strong neo-liberal discourses which resulted in a shift from a shared understanding about leading educational change in schools by knowledge transfer to managing educational change as a process, in other words, allowing the schools to decide how to change. Inside an Australian state education bureaucracy at a time when the organisation was restructured and services decentralised, this study helps show some of the disturbing trends resulting from the further entrenchment of neo-liberal strategies. Although control was re-centralised by legitimising performance mechanisms, in the form of national testing, there are indications that the focus on national tests may have alarming consequences for the content and context of education. I argue that the complexities of learning and fundamental pedagogies are being lost in preference for an over-reliance on data systems that are based on a shallow and narrow set of standardised measures.

Finding time for quality teaching: an ethnographic study of academic workloads in the social sciences and their impact on teaching practices

“…In particular, I began this project with a simple question about the impact of high workloads on teaching. Ethnography uses a range of qualitative methods, and is an accepted methodology in educational research (Beach & Player-Koro, 2012;Robinson, 2011). It is similar to the phenomenographic approach in education research which aims to reveal the qualitatively different ways in which people experience the world around them (Marton & Booth, 1997).…”

Decentralisation, managerialism and accountability: professional loss in an Australian education bureaucracy

“…The document stipulated a decentralisation of the services provided by the organisation. Funding was no longer to be linked to programmes but instead directly allocated to the schools empowering them and allowing them to become autonomous and responsible for the resources they sought (Robinson 2011). In order to carry out the decentralisation the organisation was to undergo a restructure that would result in the withdrawal of these programmes.…”

Being chimaera: a monstrous identity for SoTL academics

“…We viewed it as a 'group auto-ethnography' (Nunez & Murakami-Ramalho, 2011), with the capacity for sensitivity to complexity and multi-vocality (Mizzi, 2010). Originally a methodology from cultural anthropology, ethnography is also a valuable tool in educational research (Robinson, 2011;Scutt & Hobson, 2013).…”