On being seduced by OfSTED

In May 2002 Initial Teacher Education (Further Education) at my then University was inspected by OfSTED – mainly 3s and a few 4s meant the area was considered as inadequate: bad department. 

We work in a partnership with two other local colleges – and while each are distinct institutions with their own organisational culture, the unit of performance is ‘The Partnership’. The inspection process ties us together; something like a three legged race. Despite OfSTED's designation, there were glimmering shards of fluorescence amidst the devastation. 

OfSTED does not resonate with the same degree of authority in Higher Education as it does within schooling. The reaction of the University has been – until recently benignly supportive.

At some point in December the reaction changed from polite supportive indifference (with the assumption that the re-inspection would be a pass) to an anxiety driven aggression.  I understand this. The Teacher Education team at my former University – Primary and Secondary - were graded as 2 and 1 respectively: good department. They are in a desperate and vulnerable situation as the Coalition plans to move teacher education out of Universities into Training Schools, takes hold. They are firmly of the opinion that another 4 for  ITE FE will have repercussions beyond the minuscule FE team, smearing the credibility of the Centre for Educational Studies. There are so many theoretical tropes to draw on in attempting to make sense of this.

What I am experiencing here is the brutish force of what Lyotard (1984) refers to as performativity.    

What do I mean by performativity? Performativity is a technology, a culture and a mode of regulation that employs judgements, comparisons and displays as means of incentive, control, attrition and change, based on rewards and sanctions (both material and symbolic). The performances (of individual subjects or organizations) serve as measures of productivity or output, or displays of ‘quality’, or ‘moments’ of promotion or inspection. As such they stand for, encapsulate or represent the worth, quality or value of an individual or organization within a field of judgement.

Lytotard 1994, cited by Ball (2003) 

The classifications driven by OfSTED and the coercive power encoded within them define the professional (and personal) worth of not the department as an abstraction, but of named individuals. With decisive implications. As our consultant made clear, whispered supportively to me over a buffet lunch, ‘You’re in the firing line.’ The terrors of performativity are a totalising terror: an embodied, physical terror.  The assault is to more than reputation or creditability. 

But it is not just fear and avoidance that drives the willingness to colonise the self to the OfSTED process.  Gallies’ (2007) analyses the rhetoric of excellence by reference to condensation symbols.  The physical threat coercively encoded in OfSTED grade 1 and grade 2 demand a passionate commitment to excellence as a mask for personal and professional aspirations, fears, subconscious desires and beliefs. It is a deeply embedded metaphor that, when we suspend criticality, when we operate in the day-to-day mode we are unable to recognise or resist. Quality is a commonsensical Desirable Thing. To place yourself beyond a framework that values excellence is to place yourself beyond a framework that confers intelligibility and worth.

And so – the seductions of OfSTED.  

For Bjerrum-Nielsen (1995) seductive texts as texts which operate somewhere between an assault and a conversation.  Where the reader is disarmed in the process of reading and as such suspends critical faculty.  The reader is willingly swept off their feet; all texts aim to be seductive texts. Yet the seductive text bases its claims to credibility not on persuasion or force of argument but on empiricism.  This matters. A credible charming and extraordinarily authoritative inspector has made a decisive and welcome intervention in the re-inspection process. Without her - we would have been headed for another inadequate. Yet, this same credible charming and extraordinarily authoritative inspector consultant convinced me - for more than a moment - that the purpose of OfSTED was not – to promote government policy, was not to instil in each professional an acquiescent and suicidal ‘technology of self’, was not the promotion of an externally persuasive, government sponsored version of quality but was rather to promote equality. The data driven analysis of quality was premised on the desire to ensure that all were being treated as equals. This is a proactive strain in the framework. The compulsion was to not only to treat all as equals but to actively promote equity.

If presented well, even elephants dung is beautiful.

I do not doubt the integrity or charm of our consultant. My refusal is not inter-subjective.  What I am making clear is that the assault and conversation in this instance although embodied, but not with a person.  I am willingly subject in the process of being disarmed, I am passionate about equity. My life depends on it. There are 13 black female professors in the UK, Mirza (2009) points this out in Black Women and Educational Desire, I will work, a proud resident of strivers' row for equity and social justice in ITE FE. I conduct myself with a vigilance that notices that discrimination come in all sorts of shades and tones. My colleague's blitheness: ‘the reason Pakistani boys do less well in FE is because they leave college to work in the family business’; this area is typically white working class – by implication, before the Polish, the Africans and all the ‘others’ we were all the same.  I remind myself of difference, of diversity not only as a source of strength but as a source of power (Hall 2011).

Stuart Hall on Multiculturalism - difference as a source of power

The belief  - a belief I was seduced for more than a moment into accepting - that OfSTED's coercive apparatus is deployed to promote equity is an abstraction, a defining aspect of quality; it is a belief that makes OfSTED's data obsessed version of e/quality beautiful.  A beauty reminiscent of Ofili's paintings. 

Incompressible guidelines

We spent – all of us - teachers, managers, academics with years experience – 2 full days with a consultant explaining a text. A framework all of us felt we knew. And even if we didn’t know, all us with the skill, passion and expertise to read and understand. We were reassured that there are no surprises in OfSTED. It is all explicit. But if it is explicit – why is it so troubling to understand. Why does it take 2 days – 2 very expensive days and the request for more and the assertion that it was worth every penny spent for us to understand this document.  The organisation has more than 1 OfSTED expert. There is a contradiction here between quality as generic and quality as highly contextualised and specific, an incomprehensibility I have explored elsewhere, (Dennis 2011).

  

The abstract nature of guidelines
create awkward spaces, interstices within which professionals are required to act.  An awkwardness that when coupled with the exclusive colonisation of an area enclosed by policy and defined as quality, as e/quality and desirable - an incomprehensibility that seduces professionals, compelling them to define themselves - and what they do - in ways that subject their selves to damaging designations. 

During the meeting our consultant - charming, authoritative and worth every penny - a consultant who has changed what would have been in adequate into something that is potentially good, a consultant who has made my job infinitely easier advises us of the link OfSTED will make between recruitment and retention  If students do not stay on courses, and achieve - it is because you have not selected them appropriately. 

On hearing this, a colleague who had temporarily zoned out asked if such a judgement would persist, '...even if they died?'

Ball, S. (2003). "The teacher's soul and the terrors of performativity." Journal of Education Policy, 18(2), 215 - 228.

Bjerrum Nielsen, H. (1995). "Seductive Texts With Serious Intentions." Educational Researcher, 24(1), 4-12.

Dennis, C. (2011). "Measuring quality, framing what we know: a critical discourse analysis of the Common Inspection Framework." Literacy, 45(3), 119-125.

Gillies, D. (2007). "Excellence and education: rhetoric and reality." Education, Knowledge and Economy, 1(1), 19-35.

Mirza, H. S. (2009). Race, gender and educational desire: Why black women succeed and fail: Taylor & Francis.

#WResearcher Meme #3 How do you read to learn / learn to read: uncovering / unfolding

How do you read to learn / learn to read: uncovering / unfolding

The idea of an academic having to learn to read is counter-intuitive but resonant. Academic reading is unlike any other reading that we do. In fact – if we adopt the stance of the New Literacy Studies, it is not unreasonable to say that all reading is deeply contextual and particular  to a specific domain. This means, and I think this is true, that the reading I do for my job – reports, emails, assignments, policy papers and texts to inform my teaching, is quite unlike the reading to do for academic research – extended, exploratory, open ended texts, books, bibliographies, research reports, conference listings, chapters, published papers, my own work in the course of revision.

Becoming and remaining an academic involves a process of learning to read.

At the start of my MA I was acutely conscious of this. On one occasion, we had a session where our lecturer sat with a small seminar group and together we read a few paragraphs from a chapter. We then went on to discuss it in detail. The approach was not unlike an activity I might well have undertaken with a group of adult literacy students, although of the course the level and nature of the text and direction of the discussion was significantly different. We were reading about Bourdieu and together unpicking habitus.

I am here making a deliberate and provocative connection. The adults who come to my literacy class have a particular set of quite specific practices they have acquired in relation to reading. Joining an adult literacy class signifies a desire on their part to change, to become someone different. A changed approach to reading is part of that process. This is not unlike the aspiration to become an academic, someone who wants to be something other than who they are at the moment:  a prolifically published writer, a highly regarded academic, a quoted and referenced expert – reading is part of achieving this changed sense of self.

I am here also making a disconnection. With the adult literacy student the actual content of the text is of little importance. What matters is their capacity to explore it independently. That they can read, that I read in identification terms is as important as what I read. Oh, it has to  be interesting - but this is a loop, if it is not interesting, I won't read it. As an academic there is an interplay between what I read and that I read. I invoke the iconic image of the academic standing in front of her books displayed decoratively in the background on rows of shelves. It is being a reader that matters.

Academic reading, reading to learn, is a very particular kind of reading.

Norman Fairclough's Critical Discourse Analysis explicates the work that texts do. How they position readers – that is the writer constructs an ideal reader inviting the actual reader to fall in with the qualities assumed of that construct. This is what readers habitually do. Usually as readers we are unaware of this process. Once we become aware, we may question the assumptions and negotiate an alternative stance. But this still positions us; if we are not the desired, imagined reader constructed by the writer / the text - then we are forced to re/define ourselves as the actual, desired, imagined, self-constructed reader. We then have to negotiate our readerly selves into an alternative position in relation to text and relation to the text's imagined reader. This happens with – for example policy texts. Texts that talk about education in instrumental terms, about qualification as if it were their exchange value rather than their use value that matter. When policy texts are well written, they are compulsive, seductive, they draw the reader in with warm faltering words. You find yourself engrossed and willingly accepting the stance the writers of policy texts take, the normative truth regime they create around you and them. We are seduced by such texts when we are disarmed by them, when our critical faculty is temporarily quietened and we willingly sign up to their agenda.

Doesn’t happen often and certainly doesn’t happen with anything this particular government has written

The point is that in starting the EdD I found I had to be very structured, explicit about the reading I was doing. These academic texts were not policy texts but still I was seduced. The trouble is – I can be faddy, a 'buy-one-get-one-free' person. I would read text (a) and I love it. I enthuse and think yes! that's it, that's it.  Then I would read text (b) a scathing critique of text (a) and have the same excitement and sense of gosh golly – that is so true. At some point I realise I have to fall out of line. It helped to devise strategies to enable a more distanced, less emotional reading. 

Remembering, that in reading these texts part of what I am doing is creating a new identity for myself: an academic.

We were advised by a lecturer on how to read. Advised to ask a series of questions. I had to translate these into a template. I need to fling words across paper (or screen). It's not all in my head. I need to let it happen on paper, through my finger tips as well – otherwise too much of it disappears.

The questions – I have still have all those notes, somewhere.  

·         What is the main argument out forward by the writer?

·         How is this argument developed?

·         How well is it supported?

·         How does this connect to other things you have read?

·         Does it convince you?

·         What other reactions do you have to it?

·         What key concepts does the author develop or use?

·         Any particular vocabulary that you want to make a note of?

These questions stopped quite early – I didn’t need to be so specific, so focussed and interrogated the text in different ways. Usually in ways that was more related to the question I had in mind for a research project and paper.

This is a kind of uncovering, or at least an unfolding; it seeks to make bare what is hidden. Hidden: not through artifice as such. But is a natural process. We present the text not the draft and redraft that created it. We present a completed garment; the stitching is on the inside. Reading involves reminding yourself of the inherent sociality involved in learning. These are not truths being presented but biographies.  Someone persuasive attempt to persuade you – the reader –that this is how it is, a plausible account of how things might, just possibly might, be.  The inherent sociality of learning means reading is not a process of reading as such, as in decoding text and understanding what it means, it is a social process of conversing with someone, the person or persons who have written the text.

And so the final take on reading: unfolding

One that is I think at odds with what I would normally associate with reading, but which explores uncovering, unfolding. Fairclough suggests that the reading associated with critical discourse analysis is no more than what readers do with texts anyway. The process formalises, records and annotates this. We read text as social theorist and as ‘consumers’ professionals charged with implementing the policies they display. But what about reading data. How do we read data – this is surely all at once reading to learn and learning to read. What Faorclough describes as a process readers engage in anyway perhaps does not appreciate the extent to which the reading, re-reading, annotating and recording of readings changes the process. It slows it down. It compels connections. It is not dissimilar to the Rorschach ink splodge test. Do we create images from the random splattering of human life to meet a deep seated yearning for order, coherence, narrative thread?

May be so.

Reading data: what and how do we do this?

I refer here to something I posted earlier this week. I have now gotten over my anxiety about the UCET presentation. What is left is not the frustration of a paper that felt truly terrible – but the pride with having broken my self-imposed silence: good. And more – with looking again at my analysis and seeking to understand the source of my discontent.

To clarify. Last Thursday I presented a paper at a conference, University Council for the Education of Teachers (UCET). The paper presented was a background paper, a contextualising draft. The data that will eventfully shape the paper had only just been gathered and was largely not collated. I had 1 quote from research participants based on earlier interviews. I have often chosen to avoid speaking to peers in public situations –  if I possibly can. And so this presentation thing is quite a challenge to me. But mostly, when I present, the nerves and dread are vindicated: the session goes well, the feedback is good and I feel exhilarated. I did not enjoy UCET. I felt stilted and that I did not cover new ground. I felt it was simply a re-churning of what I already know and that I think those who chose to attend the session also knew. It ended 20 mins early and I missed whole chunks of the paper out. This feeling of dread – post presentation dread has stayed with me.

But once it subsided – a little. I thought again about the quotes I bought with me. The tiny bits of data. 

I was asking the data one question – reading the data with a particular focusing mind. As such I fear that the elephant in the room (far from couching in the corer trying to hide) was sitting and sipping coffee without my noticing. The text does not address the question I was asking – and actually does not do so for a very particular reason. That is the context within which the participants work does not allow them the exploration an answer to this question implies. In one instant at least, a participant is clearly deeply unhappy with his professional situation. Is distressed by it and seems to feel in something of a cul-de-sac. Mostly the qualification they achieve is a means of moving toward something, for him it is means of escape.

Research participants find it difficult to answer the question – what do I mean by literacy and how to I reconcile literacy as social practice and literacy as skills – because – any attempt to move beyond literacy as skills is curtailed. They recognise it but – as one participant has said, ‘at the end of the day, I still have to tick that box’.

In the assemblage that is a policy driven, research based literacy pedagogy – professionals are compelled to play dead: to appear as if they have committed the epistemic suicide that Taylor-Webb so evocatively talks about.

Drafted Wednesday, 09 November 2011 03:04:57

First edit Wednesday, 09 November 2011 22.17.25


ALBRIGHT, J. & LUKE, A. 2008. Pierre Bourdieu and literacy education, Routledge, Taylor & Francis: London.
BARTON, D. 2007. Literacy : an introduction to the ecology of written language, Malden, Mass. Oxford, Blackwell.
TAYLOR & WEBB, P. 2007. Accounting for Teacher Knowledge: Reterritorializations as epistemic suicide. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 28, 279-295.