Narrative Inquiry, leadership and ‘alternative schools’

Year: 2013

Author: Short, Trevor

Type of paper: Abstract refereed

Abstract:
The power of the grand narrative in education to drive the residualisation process is such that while teachers, leaders, and the education bureaucracies have regularly strived to initiate social justice reforms; the same education systems and educators, including me, have unwittingly become bound up, and implicated in, preserving the grand sacred story of public education which maintains the status quo.
Competitive forces and marketization promoting choice narrow what is valued in competitive public schools, and these provide mechanisms for an increasing number of children to be ‘unchosen and transported’. I propose that the ‘unchosen’ children in alternative schools are ‘canaries in the mine’ for what is happening in public education. They are the earliest casualties, the harbingers for an education future in which the continued advancement and promotion of ‘chosen’ children, in wealthier communities occurs at the expense of ‘unchosen’ children, leaving behind a lesser residual public education system for the poor.
This research explored my shared, lived experience with teachers and students within South Australian alternative public schools. ‘Alternative’ describes a small collection of schools, which have students who have been rejected by other schools by suspension and exclusion. World-wide these schools are growing in number, as a response to perceived inadequacies in the students. My practitioner research was informed by Narrative Inquiry (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000)and auto-ethnography (Ellis, 2009)and focused initially on our storied lives.
My daily reflections, and my reading foregrounded new stories with scrutiny of hidden agendas, power centres, and assumptions that inhibit, repress, and constrain. Through this I began to identify alternative readings of practitioner experience within social, economic, political and historical and relational contexts. I became aware of competing narratives, dilemmas in curriculum and pedagogy; dilemmas between systemic expectations, school purposes, accountability and teacher professional knowledge.

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