A Critical Ethnographical Study of Teachers’ Perception of their Work in a New Middle School

Terry W Hopkins

doi:10.60867/00000079

Middle schools were introduced across Australia in the 1980’s and 1990’s in response to research into the schooling of students in the transitional period between young children and young adult and, a groundswell of support from teachers who believed that there were better ways to cater for the educational and pastoral needs of young adolescents. Teachers in Australian middle schools are under escalating pressure in their workplaces from a myriad of internal and external sources. Their professional autonomy has been eroded through increasing managerialism, emerging national curriculum imperatives, changing employment opportunities and the fiscal control of education. Their work is constrained by growing accountability frameworks in the form of teacher accreditation bodies, intensifying media scrutiny, government websites comparing school performance, teacher rating websites and increasing administrative workloads. Australian middle school teachers generally lack specific middle schooling training and shoulder a substantial burden of extracurricular duties and responsibilities connected with their unique teaching and mentoring roles. In the absence of a clear blueprint for action, teachers have responded in their own ways to the pressures and tensions in their work environments, by repositioning to some extent, their personal and professional space within schools and therefore seeking to retake control over relational power, professionalism, pedagogy and the growing work intensification. This research aimed to enable teachers to share their stories and reclaim and reassert their professional and personal voices. As they narrate their relational and pedagogical journeys through a critical ethnographic lens, teachers will expose their struggle to reinvent themselves in a complex, novel and difficult work site. The research aims to expose the unconscious influences of teachers’ working environments and the subtle and pervasive ways that they mould their daily operations. This research adopts the methodology of critical ethnography to investigate one case study of a purpose-built middle school to shed light on teachers lived work experiences. Of particular interest, is the usefulness of Labour Process Theory (LPT) which provides a powerful theoretical lens through which to explore teachers’ work. I use it to interrogate the three cornerstones of Labour Process Theory - de-skilling, control over work and social reproduction to better understand the ways in which teachers struggle to maintain their professional autonomy and identity within schools. However, in adopting this approach I want to move beyond the boundaries of overly rigid and deterministic descriptions of teachers’ work distinctive in much of the early theorising of Labour Process Theory. Instead, I want to provide a greater sense of how teachers find spaces to resist, negotiate and reinvent their work, to build and maintain their professional resilience and identity.

A Critical Ethnographical Study of Teachers’ Perception of their Work in a New Middle School

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