Understanding media mentalities and logics: Institutional and journalistic practices, and the reporting of teachers’ work

This paper explores the ‘media mentalities’ about teachers and their work in the Australian print media. The notion of media mentalities draws on the theoretical concepts of discourse, mentalities, and mediatisation. This refers to the constructed realities and forms of thought in media coverage that circulate particular accounts. These are linked to institutional and journalistic practices in media that are governed by media logics. Drawing on newspaper text and interviews with journalists, the following practices are addressed: agendisation and accountabilisation which are both institutional practices; and the journalistic practices of factualisation, emphasisation, and sensationalisation – all of which operate globally, to some degree, across and within media institutions and media practitioners, and produce the news about teacher’s work within the framework of these practices

Understanding media mentalities and logics: institutional and journalistic practices, and the reporting of teachers' work

This paper explores the ‘media mentalities’ about teachers and their work in the Australian print media. The notion of media mentalities draws on the theoretical concepts of discourse, mentalities, and mediatisation. This refers to the constructed realities and forms of thought in media coverage that circulate particular accounts. These are linked to institutional and journalistic practices in media that are governed by media logics. Drawing on newspaper text and interviews with journalists, the following practices are addressed: agendisation and accountabilisation which are both institutional practices; and the journalistic practices of factualisation, emphasisation, and sensationalisation – all of which operate globally, to some degree, across and within media institutions and media practitioners, and produce the news about teacher’s work within the framework of these practices

Symbolic power, politics and teachers

Introduction In the book, Symbolic power, politics, and intellectuals: The political sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, David L. Swartz (2013) frames his discussion around the notion of power while focusing on Bourdieu's ‘political sociology’, a ‘largely neglected’ aspect of Bourdieu's work. Swartz (2013) suggests that Bourdieu offers a ‘sociology of politics’ as well as a ‘politics of sociology’. Therefore, sociology is a form of political engagement or as Bourdieu (2000a) suggests, ‘scholarship with commitment’ that enables a move towards ‘more just and democratic life’ (Swartz, 2013, p. i). This essay offers an outline of Swartz's reading of Bourdieu's political sociology using three of his ‘thinking tools’ and demonstrates the value of this book for analysing the cross-field effects of journalism and education (also see Lingard & Rawolle, 2004; Rawolle, 2005)..

Media accounts of school performance: reinforcing dominant practices of accountability

Media reportage often act as interpretations of accountability policies thereby making the news media a part of the policy enactment process. Within such a process, their role is that of policy reinforcement rather than policy construction or contestation. This paper draws on the experiences of school leaders in regional Queensland, Australia, and their perceptions of the media frames that are used to report on accountability using school performance. The notion of accountability is theorised in terms of media understandings of ‘holding power to account’, and forms the theoretical framework for this study. The methodological considerations both contextualise aspects of the schools involved in the study, and outline how ‘framing theory’ was used to analyse the data. The paper draws on a number of participant experiences and newspaper accounts of schools to identify the frames that are used by the press when reporting on school performance. Three frames referring to school performance are discussed in this paper: those that rank performance such as league tables; frames that decontextualise performance isolating it from school circumstances and levels of funding; and frames that residualise government schools

Children resisting deficit: What can children tell us about literate lives?

Research has demonstrated that teachers who know more about the literate lives of their students outside of the classroom are more able to set up positive connections between home and school. In this article, we theorise the notion of ‘deficit’ discourses in education. Using two cases as examples, we seek to disrupt deficit discourses about children in communities of high poverty. The first case describes children’s responses when asked to draw and talk about learning to write, and highlights children’s explication of the role of the family in literacy learning. The second case describes an outside school media space where children engaged over time with a variety of new media and digital texts. These examples make the point that listening to young people can provide surprising insights into children’s aspirations and their understandings of the affordances of learning literacy. Our findings challenge the assumptions that underpin deficit understandings of children and young people growing up in communities of high poverty, and suggest that listening to children and young people in schools may well support the goal of providing quality schooling for all students

Using design-based research methods to reform teaching and learning

Design-based research methods are becoming popular as a way to study and theorise practice within education. Engaging in design-based research methods involves more than just trying a new method of teaching or designing an intervention with your class. The point of engaging in design-based methods of research is to develop theories about learning and teaching, and to think about teaching practice beyond a ‘what works’ kind of way (Cobb, Confrey, diSessa, Lehrer, & Schauble, 2003)..

Materialities, multiliteracies and makerspaces: design-based experiments in teacher/researcher collaborations

With increasing digitization and multimodality within society, text production forms a key element of what it means to be literate in today’s literate culture – interactions between children and young people and digital texts, tools and resources are embedded in everyday practices. This shift – along with changes to work practices and the economy - has also resulted in text production becoming a more collaborative practice. When we think about literacies for current times – we usually think about multimodality and digital technologies. Digital tools, resources and technologies have had a radical effect on how we produce texts, how we communicate with each other, the kinds of interactions we can have – the very social organization of the spaces in which we engage. When we acknowledge this, we are acknowledging that everyday life involves an entanglement of social with material; human with non-human; technological and non-technological. These sociomaterial ways of thinking challenge our preoccupation with single individuals using literacy tools (Fenwick, Edwards, & Sawchuk 2011) whether traditional print or digital in order to get things done. From this way of thinking, ‘technology’ in whatever form is valuable, meaningful and worth studying as people actually engage with it to get things done. But we move beyond being interested just in what a young child can ‘do’ with technology toward thinking about how the material as well as the discursive and the virtual works with the human and non-human world. It is this decoupling of knowing and action from a strictly human centred ‘being’ or ontology that is a key contribution of sociomaterial theories (Fenwick, Edwards, & Sawchuk 2011). In this chapter we consider literacies and learning to be literate for current times and thinking, and then present data from one study of how children learn to write and produce texts in their early school years. We highlight data collected as part of one design-based research project from this larger study, where teachers and researchers worked together to plan and implement a series of lessons which began with opportunities for children to engage in makerspace activities, before moving to produce texts in other modes. We are particularly interested in the materiality of these activities and how they shifted the roles of children and adults in the classroom space

Academic research and public debates: A media analysis of the proposed Australian phonics check

This chapter engages with current public and political debates on the teaching of literacy in the early years in which the dominant voices advocate for one best method of teaching literacy. Such debates often surface in media coverage and give rise to negative public perceptions of literacy learning in schools. We take as an example the recent move to introduce a Phonics Check into the early years of schooling in Australia, as a way into thinking about whose voices are heard and come to matter in policy debates, and the impact of contemporary communications methods, particularly social media, on policy debates. The policy suggestion has been billed as working toward the provision of important information about young children to their teachers, but has been critiqued for presenting nonsense words to young readers, and for ignoring the professional capacity of early years’ teachers in knowing and assessing the capabilities and needs of the children they are teaching, without the requirement for standardised tests. We examine this policy, which is part of a suite of policy initiatives that risk creating an imbalance between professionalism and prescription in schools in current times, and provide an analysis of the debate in contemporary print and social media

Student voice and teacher voice in educational research: a systematic review of 25 years of literature from 1995–2020

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in student and teacher voice in education. What distinguishes ‘teacher voice’ or ‘student voice’ from simply reflecting participants’ views as a source of data is the placement of participants in an empowered participatory position. It is the positioning of their voice as consisting of more than a process, and as something with value and power that extends voice engagement as one beyond that of informant. While research might focus on either student voice or teacher voice in isolation, there are few studies that position voice as something with power, and integrate the perspectives of both groups as being views that matter. This systematic review investigates and describes the nexus between student voice and teacher voice in educational research over 25 years and provides a framework for identifying the extent to which certain views and perspectives are prioritised in research, and whether the participatory function of the positioned research is doing what it sets out to do.</p