Thinking outside the box? Trade union organising strategies and Polish migrant workers in the UK

On the 1 May 2004 the EU witnessed its most challenging enlargement, with the accession of eight post-communist countries (known as the A8)1. Despite the EU’s espoused ‘fundamental freedom’ of labour mobility, the UK was only one of three countries to open up its labour market to entrants from the A8 economies2 Predictions in the UK, that the number of workers seeking jobs in the labour market from post-communist economies would only be modest, could not have been more wrong and attempts to establish accurate figures have been a source of vexation for both national and local government. All A8 workers who are employed in the UK have to register on the Worker Registration Scheme and Poles comprise 66 per cent of A8 migrants (Border and Immigration Agency, 2007). But this is a cumulative total and does not include those who are self-employed or indeed those who have just not registered. There is, however, a growing consensus that this Polish migration constitutes the largest single in-migration ever to the UK (Salt and Millar, 2006). As an interviewee commented ‘what is different with this migration is the scale and in particular the Poles’ (Senior officer TUC Organising Department)

A logic of appropriation: enacting national testing (NAPLAN) in Australia

This paper explores how the strong policy push to improve students’ results on national literacy and numeracy tests – the National Assessment Program, Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) – in the Australian state of Queensland influenced schooling practices, including teachers’ learning. The paper argues the focus upon improved test scores on NAPLAN within schools was the result of sustained policy pressure for increased attention to such foci at national and state levels, and a broader political context in which rapid improvement in test results was considered imperative. However, implementation, (or what this paper describes more accurately as ‘enactment’) of the policy also revealed NAPLAN as providing evidence of students’ learning, as useful for grouping students to help improve their literacy and numeracy capabilities, and as a stimulus for teacher professional development. Drawing upon the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, the paper argues that even as more political concerns about comparing NAPLAN results with other states were recognised by educators, the field of schooling practices was characterised by a logic of active appropriation of political concerns about improved test scores by teachers, for more educative purposes. In this way, policy enactment in schools is characterised by competing interests, and involving not just interpretation, translation and critique but active appropriation of political concerns by teachers

Teacher professional development: A sociological study of senior educators’ PD priorities in Ontario

This study investigated senior educators' viewpoints on teacher professional development (PD). To examine the nature and source of participants' perspectives, the study employed Bourdieu's notion of practice as socially constituted and contested. Interviews were conducted in southern Ontario with 24 senior Ministry officials, principals, and academics. Participants' current and prior experiences predisposed them to support profession-driven PD, as well as PD for systemic-accountability purposes. The study suggests PD policy directives for provincial foci should (a) incorporate approaches that begin with teachers' existing knowledge and understanding, (b) address specific school circumstances, and (c) be cognizant of broader conceptions of students' needs

Competing pressures in practice: teachers' pedagogies and work under complex policy conditions

Engaged and engaging teaching require teacher pedagogies and work which encourage respect for students and families, the ability to adapt curricula and policy reforms to contextual needs, and a willingness to learn on-the-job, on an ongoing basis. Arguably, current national and state curricula and testing policies in Australia seek to promote such capacity and complexity. However, such policies do not necessarily promote truly productive pedagogical practices. To elaborate this discrepancy, this paper draws upon Bourdieu's notion of the world as comprising competing social spaces or 'fields' characterised by contestation, and applies this conception of practice to the effects of current national Australian and state policies upon teachers' pedagogies, work and learning. To exemplify these effects, the paper draws upon the experiences and practices of two Special Education teachers working in a remote rural community in the state of Queensland, under policy conditions which encourage a strong focus upon prescribed curricula, and constant concerns about numeric/quantifiable measures of students' literacy and numeracy. The paper contrasts the context-responsiveness of these teachers' pedagogies and work with a more generic curriculum and data-centric policy setting which makes it difficult to focus upon more genuinely student-centred teaching and learning practices. Such an approach implies the need to revisit policy efforts to enact standardised tests and curricula, and that the teaching profession would be better served if, at the very least, more attention were given to teachers' own pedagogies, work and learning, in specific settings

Testing that counts: Contesting national literacy assessment policy in complex schooling settings

This paper explores how the national testing regime in Australia, the National Assessment Program for Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN), has influenced how teachers understand their work and learning, particularly as this relates to the literacy practices most valued under these circumstances. Drawing upon an emerging literature on the sociology of numbers and statistics, and literature on the nature of quality and purposeful teaching practices, including in settings with significant proportions of ESL students, the paper describes how teachers' understandings of their practice in one rural/remote school serving a low SES, predominantly Indigenous community in northern Queensland reflect the co-constructed nature of statistics and students' learning, as well as efforts to try to be more responsive to these students as predominantly additional language learners. The paper reveals that this is not a straight-forward process, but involves tensions between what Saetnan, Lomell and Hammer (2011) describe as various 'centripetal forces' which trend towards standaridisation of learning, and 'centrifugal forces' which challenge this standardisation by valuing local context, knowledge and traditions. Furthermore, how these tensions actually play out also reveals a nuanced understanding of the nature, benefits and problems of such testing, English language learning in Indigenous settings more generally, and evidence of student and teacher learning beyond testing per se. Such considered, situated knowledge and understandings are silenced in much of the current discourse around national education provision and testing in Australia, and other countries

Critiquing teacher professional development: Teacher learning within the field of teachers’ work

This study is an empirical account of the professional development (PD) practices that constituted part of the work of a group of teachers and school-based administrators working together in a cluster of six schools in southeast Queensland, Australia, during a period of intense educational reform. The data comprise meeting transcripts and interviews with teachers and administrators involved in a reform-oriented professional development initiative over an 18-month period. To analyse these teacher learning practices as teachers' work in this context, the article draws upon Bourdieu's theory of practice, particularly his understanding of the social world as comprising multiple social spaces, or 'fields', each characterised by contestation over the practices of most value. The data reveal the field of teachers' work, in which much of the teacher learning transpired, as influenced by a broader instrumental culture; this culture developed in response to teachers' concerns about how to respond to state educational provision initiatives in a more neoliberal global era. These instrumental logics were evident in superficial compliance with and reflection upon educational reform and the continuation of individualistic, workshop-based PD practices. However, at the same time and in keeping with fields as contested, there is also evidence of teachers' participation in more sustained PD practices - involving teachers actively engaging with the content of educational reform, participating in robust reflection about their practice and collaborating in substantive communities of learners. The findings also suggest the need to explicitly support substantive PD within the field of teachers' work in order to challenge more administrative and instrumental pressures to engage in reform. Such a response will assist in fostering the conditions for the generation of a more truly student-centred, collaborative and reflective habitus amongst teachers

Teacher talk: Flexible delivery and academics’ praxis in an Australian university

This article reveals how a university-wide decision to implement flexible delivery at an Australian regional university stimulated academics' praxis in the form of committed, collaborative inquiry into teaching practice and students' learning. This inquiry took the form of deliberately developed conversations amongst academics about their teaching practices. The article reports the discussions of a group of seven education academics who met regularly over a 6-month period to better understand, with a view to improving, their teaching practices in the context of the introduction of a new e-technology platform at their university. Analysis of detailed transcripts of semi-structured meetings of the group suggests considerable evidence of praxis amongst members. This was evident in the way participants interacted with one another in their efforts to interrogate what flexible learning meant, their response to the change process instigated by the move to flexible delivery, and their critique of the usefulness of information and communication technologies for teaching practice and student learning. The findings validate collaborative inquiry approaches as a form of praxis in university settings. © 2010 Taylor & Franci

Quantum state diffusion, measurement and second quantization

Realistic dynamical theories of measurement based on the diffusion of quantum states are nonunitary, whereas quantum field theory and its generalizations are unitary. This problem in the quantum field theory of quantum state diffusion (QSD) appears already in the Lagrangian formulation of QSD as a classical equation of motion, where Liouville's theorem does not apply to the usual field theory formulation. This problem is resolved here by doubling the number of freedoms used to represent a quantum field. The space of quantum fields is then a classical configuration space, for which volume need not be conserved, instead of the usual phase space, to which Liouville's theorem applies. The creation operator for the quantized field satisfies the QSD equations, but the annihilation operator does not satisfy the conjugate eqation. It appears only in a formal role.Comment: 10 page