Analysing Policy Documents

SER Support Session

Structure of the Session

• Introduction: the structure of the session

• Orienting activity, towards textual analysis

• Presentation and exposition: constructing an analysis, analytic methods

• Exercise activity

• Plenary: constructing the SER

Practice in school settings is framed by state level and school level policies. An analysis of these policies positions us to make an analysis of the practice.

Orientation

This activity should take about 10 minutes.

•Read the Teaching and Learning Policy from Wrightern College

•Note your first thoughts/ initial impressions

•Discuss with your neighbour any questions that arise from reading the policy.

Analysing a policy text

• There will be an author and audience position

• There will be a message

• what are the oppositions constructed?

• what are the presumptions or assertions? What are the calls to “common sense” or the “obvious”? How are these statements constructed? How and to what purpose are they deployed?

• There will be an empirical context in which this text can be situated.

Text and Discourse

• Discourse, in a foucauldian way, are the texts which surround practice and utterance, providing a way of describing leading to action in accord with the description.

• ...and we must understand by this a sort of communal opinion, a collective representation that is imposed on every individual; we must not understand by it a great anonymous voice that must, of necessity, speak through the discourses of everyone; but we must understand by it the totality of things said, the relations, the regularities, and the transformations that may be observed in them, the domain of which certain figures, certain intersections indicate the unique place of a speaking subject and may be given the name of author. 'Anyone who speaks', but what he says is not said from anywhere. It is necessarily caught up in the play of an exteriority

(Michel Foucault The Archaeology of Knowledge p.22).

Textual Analysis

Dowling and Brown (2009) Doing Research/Reading Research

• Biasing the description. Your job as analyst is to make clear which principles of analysis you are going to use.

• “… the text very definitely does not tell it's own story. Rather, it's description must be biased according to an explicit and coherent organisational language …" [p.94]

• “… the organisational language must relate directly to the system about which claims are to be made …” [p.93]

Discursive saturation

• A policy text seeks to delineate discourse: to define in text a practice.

• Dowling (1998, 2009) makes a distinction between practices in terms of discursive saturation.

• “Whilst all practices are material, some practices minimize their dependency upon the material via production of highly developed and articulated - that is highly systematized - discursive structures” [1998:p.137] (DS+)

• Activities whose practices exhibit low discursive saturation (DS–) are characterized by implicit regulating principles. That is, specialization at the level of the non-discursive, but not, to any great extent at the level of the discursive

Paul Dowling (1998) The Sociology of Mathematics Education

Wrightern College T&L policy document

“This policy is a statement of how teaching and learning should take place at Wrightern College PE department”

AnalysisAuthor/Audience: If it is aimed at teachers at Wrightern, then they would know this. Announcing that the school is “Wrightern” suggests an audience outside of the school. Whom might that be? The modal auxiliary “should” is less insistent than “must”. What does this signify about the authority of the author? Implication of hope? Little indication of “will”. (can, may, shall, will, must)

Opposition: Wrighten College PE Department/elsewhere

DS+/DS-: We might expect here some guidance about what teaching and learning is.

Wrightern College T&L policy document

“It should ensure consistency, coherence and continuity by developing a shared understanding of the quality of teaching and learning process that we expect at Wrightern College”

Analysis

Author/Audience: Again a slight hedging with “should”. Why this lack of determination?

Opposition: High/Low quality in the ‘teaching and learning process’

DS+/DS-: What is meant here by “quality”?

Wrightern College T&L policy document

Have evidence that your lessons are well prepared.

Analysis

Author/Audience: Now there is a directive ‘have’ why is this a requirement? Has a specific directive plus surveillance strategy been implemented for this one?

Opposition: Well prepared/Poorly prepared lessons.

DS+/DS-: Not, “prepare your lessons”. Not, a definition of what makes a “well prepared” lesson. Not, why you need evidence?

Wrightern College T&L policy document

Take account of pupils’ concentration spans (on average, the number of minutes for which a pupil can concentrate is their chronological age plus two), which means changing activities two or three times in an ordinary lesson.

Communicate high expectations and insist on high standards of behaviour, but be sure to balance one negative with four positive comments.

Pay attention to the physical condition of the classroom – check that there is enough fresh air, that the temperature is OK (too hot and the brain slows down, too cold and pupils are distracted) and that there is plenty of colourful and stimulating material on the walls.

Analysis

Author/Audience: Faux science, who might be talking to who?

DS+/DS-: concentration, high expectations/behaviour, brain (hot/slow),

Wrightern College T&L policy document

The rich context

•Ofsted … New Management … New government policy … Governing body … school development cycle …

•How would you interrogate this?

1. What are the author and audience positions?

2. What oppositions can you identify?

3. Which statements show DS+ or DS- ? (What does this say about management strategies?)

4. What questions would you ask or data would you collect to construct a rich context (a Foucauldian discourse)?

Doing the Analysis: Activity

• Every parent wants to know that their child will be safe and happy at school and every child has the right to learn in a well-run, orderly school, with good behaviour in every classroom...

• ...it is unacceptable for the learning of any class to be disrupted by the bad behaviour of one or two pupils.

• Behaviour improvement is not an optional extra. It is part of the core business of schools.

• Good standards of teaching and clear expectations of learners will promote improved behaviour. We therefore agree with Sir Alan that each school should develop a teaching and learning policy, making clear how good teaching and classroom management promote both effective learning and positive behaviour.

DCSF: Delivering the behaviour challenge

Author/Audience

Oppositions•good/bad behaviour•parent and child/ school and teacher•Well-run/badly run

DS+/DS-

Rich Context

• Attempts to define school practice

• But writes from the point of view of the ‘electorialism’, the practice in which political parties are engaged.

• A gaze is cast on schooling which is rewritten from state-level practice

State level document

School level document

• Attempts to define classroom practice

• Recontextualisation of various texts; a bricolage.

• Here the school management practice is ‘defence’

Data to Analysis

1. Analyse (using the 4 analytic principles) the principle state level policy text.

• To what extent is it in sync. with research evidence and debate?

2. Analyse the school level policy text.

• To what extent is it in sync. with the state level policy text?

3. Generate data (e.g. notably from interviews … design your questions from your analysis of the policy documents)

• The person with management responsibility for the policy: SLT

• People responsible for enacting the policy: teachers.

• Recipients of the policy: students