Background

The perception of a crisis in the learning of secondary school students in the age range 12–15 years has been widely reported across research and in the media and responded to with increasing levels of policy intervention (Baroutis & Lingard, 2017; McCallum et al., 2020; Tudge, 2021). The perception of a decline in Australian students’ results and overall performance relative to other countries as evidenced on national (NAPLAN) and international (e.g. TIMMS, PISA) standardised tests underpins such interventions. The ‘solution’ to this crisis in test achievement results has been framed by government policy as a deficit in ‘teacher quality’ (Tudge, 2021). Over the past two decades, regimes of accountability have been constructed and implemented to address perceptions of lack of teacher quality in an increasingly market-driven response to global education reform (Ball, 2013; Cochran-Smith, 2004; Connell, 2013; Sahlberg, 2016; Zajda, 2020). Considerable funding has been invested in administering these regimes and on the regulated provision of teacher professional learning programs. It has been suggested that some significant policy interventions aimed at correcting perceived teacher deficits are solutions to a problem constructed in policy that may not exist in reality. In addition, that while teachers have often been constructed as problematic, the policy agenda fails to recognise they are not the only factor impacting student learning (Stacey, 2017).

This paper reports on a study that further explored my over-arching research interest in how teachers learn to transform their teaching practice to better meet the needs of their student learners. In prior research, I have investigated this question beginning from the standpoint of teachers (Talbot, 2015a, b) through research informed by the ontology of Institutional Ethnography (IE) (Smith, 2005). IE focusses on the experiences of frontline workers and how their work is governed by material factors, including texts, from a distance. The new study, reported on here, was similarly interested in teachers’ transformed practice. The significant variation was that it began from the standpoint of the students, as the frontline ‘knowers’ of what they perceive as making a difference to their capacity to learn. My IE informed approach acknowledged that ‘Students know their learning needs and problems, and therefore they are in the best position to tell the school what to learn and how to learn it’ (Mok, 1997, p. 318). The study explored the disjuncture between policy formulated at a distance from the students affected, policy that focusses on teacher ‘quality’, and what students might know about the factors, including and beyond their teachers, that they perceive as impacting their learning.

Commonly, the reporting on an IE study would focus on the way in which social relations have been constructed and influenced by the ‘governing texts’ (Smith & Turner, 2014). There is, however, no ‘prescriptive orthodoxy’ when it comes to methods employed in IE. Rather, it is an ‘emergent mode of inquiry, always subject to revision and the improvisation required by new applications’ (Devault & McCoy, 2005, p. 16). My main purpose in this paper is to draw attention to the way in which IE can position students as knowers of their own learning and then allow for flexibility in the methods used to consult students on such matters. I will provide examples from the study findings to discuss moments of surprise experienced by the school executive at some of the factors raised by students. Such surprises occurred even though the school executive had paid close attention to the results of the NSW Department of Education Tell Them From Me (TTFM) survey (NSW Government, 2023), as referenced in the School Plan 2018–2020 and described as the way the school consults with staff, students, and parents. The TTFM survey and the 3-year school plan were revealed as significant governing texts of the social relations connected into students’ capacity to learn.

IE and student voice

Research incorporating student voice has examined student learning before, during, or after a pedagogical intervention, however, this has generally been particular to the intervention (e.g. Charteris & Thomas, 2017; Grainger et al., 2019; Mayes, 2016; Mayes et al., 2021). Most of this research examines teacher pedagogy linked to specific aspects of curriculum (Gore & Rosser, 2020) and/or structures of schooling and some has included considerations of student wellbeing (Anderson & Graham, 2016). Some survey research across multiple contexts has consulted students, for example, on their views of effective classroom management and found that across a wide range of schooling contexts, caring relationships were key to students experiencing engagement with learning (Egeberg & McConney, 2018). Engaging with students as co-creators of learning, be it their own or that of their teachers, is complex and not unproblematic. According to Nelson (2021, p. 17), the ‘pervasive authoritative positioning of teachers’ acts as a barrier to enactment of student-involved pedagogical design even when the teacher is committed to a student voice approach.

Mayes et al. (2021) posit that reductive shaping of student voice caused by alignment with policy and institutional practices constrains the potential for transformative educational practices (p. 196). We need to better understand what enhances learning from the students’ own perspectives while resisting performative approaches to student voice that limit what students can give voice to and about. The NSW Department of Education Tell Them From Me Survey (TTFMS) (2023) consists of ‘a suite of surveys for measuring student engagement and wellbeing’ and is designed to provide ‘reliable evidence for schools to use in identifying strengths and areas for improvement’. It could be seen as a ‘scaled up’ approach to giving students a voice about what matters to them in terms of their learning or as a ‘performative approach’ to student voice. An important finding from this study relates to the level of ‘surprise’ that the school executive team expressed at several of the factors commonly raised by students. The school executive had not developed prior awareness of the students’ views on these matters from either the (TTFMS) or other data sources.

The innovation provided by this study offered two important features. First, it framed student voice inquiry within an institutional ethnography (IE) by recognising students as the knowers of their own educational experience and acknowledging their capabilities to assess for themselves what enhances their capacity to learn. Second, it utilised one, open-ended question that allowed students to respond in a direction that they chose and in ways that might go beyond summative measures of their performance to consider any factors that they perceived enhanced their capacity to learn. Factors that ‘enhance capacity to learn’ were explained to students as being anything that made them feel like they were more able to learn. Capacity to learn was purposefully chosen to open conversations with students about their learning beyond point-in-time measures and possibly beyond school-based factors. IE inquiry begins where people are and proceeds from there to discoveries that are for them, for us, of the workings of a social that extends beyond any one of us, bringing our local activities into coordination with those of others (Smith, 2006, p. 3).

Using IE as the mode of inquiry, the study sought to understand the entangled relationships between students’ capacity to undertake the work of learning and a broad range of impacting factors, as they arose in student talk and were traced to teachers and governance of practices.

IE, as an ontology ‘focuses researchers’ attention on the materiality of people’s lives and the socially organized practices of coordination that shape the conditions that people encounter’ (McCoy, 2021, p. 35). The ontology brings four aspects into consideration: ‘Individuals are there; they are in their bodies; they are active; and what they’re doing is coordinated with the doings of others’ (Smith, 2005, p. 59). A mode of inquiry informed by IE, thus, enables a move away from locating the reasons for poor learning outcomes in the individual themselves and seeks to understand the ruling relations that govern how learning takes place. That is, to understand how local and extra-local practices govern the actions of learners. It does this by beginning from the ‘actual doings’ of the student occupying the ‘knower’ standpoint (Smith, 2005). From the standpoint of the student as knower of their own experiences of learning, this study had potential to reveal new insights into the ways in which students’ capacity to learn was being coordinated and impacted by factors such as teachers’ pedagogy, schooling structures, school processes and policy, life outside the classroom, and beyond school, or anything else they chose to mention.

IE allows the authority of ‘knowing’ to rest with the informant. IE does not involve the use of any prescribed set of methods, but it is incumbent upon the IE researcher to facilitate the knowers’ telling of their experience without imposition of hegemonic perspectives, in this case, dominant perceptions of learning and schooling. Positioning the student as ‘knower’ of their own learning and the factors that they perceive as impacting on their learning provides the possibility of hearing and attending to factors that are within and outside any school. IE allows for the inclusion of learning that occurs in communities outside the school fence. It might also include international contexts, in the case of migrant and refugee students. Overall, the ontological approach taken in this study acknowledges that there is no simple linear causal relationship between actions directed at learning and students’ enhanced capacity to learn. Rather, it is ‘the four-part package’ of coordination originally described by Smith (2005, p. 59) and more recently revisited by McCoy (2021). Phenomena associated with learning came into view as results of the unfolding spacetime configurations of the research process within the context of the study school. Thus, not all that might be known has been revealed.

Study methods

The study was funded by a competitive internal university grant, and obtained university ethics approval and NSW Department of Education (SERAP) approval. Data were collected across one academic year in a public, comprehensive, secondary school in the south-west of Sydney enrolling students from a range of cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds. The ICSEA value of the school is 975 (Average 1000), 73% of students fall in the bottom two quartiles for socio-educational advantage, and 80% of students are from non-English speaking backgrounds. The study consulted with 53 students in 16 focus group interviews across years 7–11, including four students from the Special Education class. Fourteen teachers, identified by students as having influenced their capacity to learn, mostly positively, were then interviewed individually. To reveal the influence of governing texts on student experiences of learning, student talk was traced through to the talk of the teachers they specifically mentioned. Teacher talk gave clues to the institutional structures impacting student learning experiences, of which students had little or no direct knowledge. A final focus group was conducted with the school executive to discuss preliminary findings and to clarify details of school-based decisions and local provisions for learning as they related to what students and/or teachers had said. Findings from the study were published as a summary report for the participating school and the NSW Department of Education.

While IEs can be either immersive or have a fixed agenda, the study sought to answer the following research questions:

  1. 1.

    What do secondary students say has influenced their capacity to learn at school?

  2. 2.

    Can factors reported by students be traced to local and extra-local governance?

Students are often unused to talking about their learning and may not employ pedagogical language to describe what helps them to take actions in relation to their learning (Perry et al., 2019). Originally, I intended to employ ‘autophotographic’ methods to stimulate focus group discussion (Fox-Turnball, 2011; Groundwater-Smith et al., 2015) whereby students would be asked to ‘produce’ their own artefact related to their learning. The participant information sheet described the artefact as ‘a photograph, a piece of your work, or an object that means something to you because it has made a difference to your learning’. I had asked students to bring their artefact along to the focus group. The student selection of the artefact aimed to open-up discussion in directions determined by the students and to reduce my influence on the ‘apparatus’ (Barad, 2007) of focus group discussions. Students, however, did not commonly bring an artefact and when they did bring something it tended to be a certificate related to academic achievement which narrowed the discussion amongst students to summative assessment of their learning. This might have been anticipated as a student’s ‘voice’ does not occur in isolation from other voices (Bakhtin, 1981) or from the hegemony of power structures embedded in the shared context (Bakhtin, 1981). After the first day of conducting focus groups, I recognised the need to pivot to a different approach for getting the talk going in a way that would enable each student to voice their ‘speaking personality’ (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 434). In the absence of student-generated photographs, I made the change to selecting and providing copyright free images from the Internet of people in the students’ age range engaged in a variety of activities and ways of working that might reasonably be connected to learning in a school-like environment. The images were spread around in the centre of the table and students were free to select one or more image to view and comment on or not. This approach allowed students to take control of what was talked about. Whenever students talked about specific rooms and facilities or specific teachers, I asked follow-up questions to ensure that I would be able to identify and hence trace their comments for further investigation of the social relations implicated in their comments about learning. This included asking them to name the teachers they were talking about. The intention was to maintain a dialogic space (Bakhtin, 1981; Talbot, 2015a) where power over talk time and topic choice did not reside with one person.

Each of the focus group conversations with students was audio recorded and transcribed. I also took handwritten notes of what I considered as ‘leads’, or hints of the implicated social relations, to follow up in subsequent phases of the tracing process. Dialogic analysis of the transcripts was conducted such that complete utterances (Bakhtin, 1981; Talbot, 2016; Voloshinov, 1973) were considered before being tagged with an identifier to indicate what was being spoken about. An utterance begins when a speaker initiates dialogue on a particular topic or theme and ends when the speaker changes the subject. A dialogic analysis considers a speaker’s remark in relation to the context in which it was spoken, what may or may not have been said by others engaged in the focus group conversation, and the tone of the speaker and the overall conversation before ascribing meaning to the words (Eagleton, 1996). Remarks were then categorised and organised into tables for each year group. The student focus groups facilitated compilation of a list of teachers for interview. As I progressively analysed the student focus group and teacher interview transcripts, I drew a map of connections between who was speaking, what they were speaking about, and the links to other people or material influences, including any document trails. The map was hand drawn, large, and messy, but extremely useful. The final focus group was with the school executive. This extended conversation of some 90 min allowed for further investigation of the social relations implicated in what students had said about their enhanced capacity to learn was linked to details teachers had provided, and provided an opportunity to gather reactions from the executive group to what students and teachers had reported.

Findings and discussion

In this paper, I will draw on a selection of the overall project data, as it relates to certain themes to highlight the findings that most surprised the school executive. The surprises revealed by the IE & student voice approach were both negative, indicative of areas to be addressed in future school planning, and positive, often directly linked to previous planning. The 3-year school plan emerged as a significant governing text in relation to establishing the social relations that supported positive student comments about their capacity to learn.

Teacher pedagogy

Students made no assertions indicating that there were teachers from whom they did not learn for significant periods of time. Students, across all years were able to articulate that surveillance purely for the purpose of maintaining a quiet classroom and tasks to be completed individually without any genuine check-in from the teacher, to assess progress and/or to provide assistance, were not conducive to their learning.

Year 7: … he [teacher] makes me uncomfortable and it’s just the way he puts everything. He’s pretty strict …but … sometimes he doesn’t pay attention. There are times when he’s walking around and staring at everyone and there are times when he’s just sitting at his desk not looking at the class and a lot of people are just going on their phones and talking instead of doing their tasks. …It’s wasting a period. Fifty minutes of doing nothing. We’re not really doing anything productive.

Students rarely talked about their work being interrupted by the behaviour of other students except when the class was being supervised by a casual teacher. They did talk quite a bit about teachers who negatively affected their learning by creating an intimidating atmosphere. They were able to clearly describe the difference between teachers who unnervingly watched them as an act of surveillance in an atmosphere of hyper-vigilance distinguishable from teachers who were alert and responsive to their individual learning needs. They preferred teachers who do not always have their ‘teacher voice’ on and who create a calm atmosphere because they trust their students to do what is asked.

The school executive was surprised and dismayed by the lack of consistency that was revealed across science teachers’ pedagogy in terms of enhancing students’ capacity to learn. Some students reported very positive learning in the subject designated as STEM (a subject running alongside regular Maths and Science classes as an extension for students in the top academic stream). This did not seem to flow on consistently into regular Science and Maths classes where learning in particular teachers’ classes was perceived as less than satisfactory by some groups of students for a significant proportion of the time.

Year 8: (Teacher A) gives us textbook work and everyone just goes on their phones

Year 8: (Teacher B) uses real life situations for people to understand science which helps the class because they can’t really understand textbook work.

Year 9: In science it really depends on which teacher you have. Some teachers like to do more pracs with the class because they know that pracs would help the class. Other teachers are mostly textbook work or printing work sheets for the students.

As a result, the executive discussed the necessity for a whole-of-faculty approach to a professional learning intervention focussed on improving students’ learning experiences to even out the inconsistencies in teacher effect reported by students. The proposal for this professional learning approach was informed by the ruling relations revealed in students’ discussions of what positively enhanced their capacity to learn.

As students discussed the factors that positively enhanced their capacity to learn, they were able to make distinctions between pedagogies they considered more or less effective. For example, teachers’ use of learning resources, especially videos. Even year 7 were well aware of the ‘time-wasting’ strategy of watching a whole video in some Health classes without guided analysis when only a small portion was required for the task that followed. They perceived and appreciated when the English teachers chose videos appropriate to the task and to suit the interests of their own class.

Year 7: (two students talking to the group) (Student 1)…she knows when to let us watch movies because she chooses the well-educated movies that are also fun to watch as well. At the start of the year, between term 1 and 2, we watched this movie called Hugo and it taught us about how a hero has a journey through the entire life. (Student 2) In my class we’re watching The Lion and it was basically the same thing about a hero’s journey, with the plot line and we had to study the plot line of the movie. It’s called the hero’s journey and then after that we wrote our own narratives about the hero’s journey.

Year 7 students commented on their English teacher’s use of student choice of product. Neither the students nor teachers named this as a pedagogical procedure for differentiation (Maker, 1982; Tomlinson, 2004).

Year 7: She gives us our choice of what we want to do… Not every lesson, just some lessons that we have… She lets us choose whether to do plays, re-enact plays, make our own scripts and act them out.

Overall, procedures for differentiation were not well described even while the need for them was recognised by year 9 as part of a general discussion.

Year 9: I think they need to realise that they’re not teaching a class. They’re teaching 30 different individuals.

Students were aware and appreciated those teachers who designed collaborative activities, even when they were based on work from the textbook, rather than just assigning the textbook work to be completed individually. The structuring of collaborative groupwork was recognised by students as providing strong social-emotional support.

Year 7: … and also how our teacher, (Health Ed teacher) creates, makes the activities and how we learn it. Usually, we’re in table groups. The table we’re sitting on, we usually make a mind map of what we’re learning about and then we write our ideas on a board and at the end she reads it all and compares the different answers.

DT: How does that make you feel as a learner?

Year 7: I like it because I get to see how other people, what perspective they have on what we’re learning about.

Pedagogical procedures that allow for sharing perspectives were appreciated by students across all year groups. Students were able to describe tasks that they felt were engaging because they were authentic to the discipline. For example, year 9 appreciated that the ‘Health Ed’ teacher included authentic activities as part of the wellbeing strategies they were learning about.

Year 9: Our health teacher has started practising mindfulness and meditation at the beginning of classes. People find it relaxing.

The Year 11 special education students valued authentic tasks in which they each had a clearly defined contribution to make to a collaborative team effort.

DT: (Summing up their individual descriptions) When you’re working in the kitchen, you each have something that you’re responsible for?

Year 11: Yes! [in chorus]

DT: But you’re part of a big team?

Year 11: Yes… As one …It’s called team leader …It’s more a team effort. Team player.

DT: Does working in that way help you learn?

Year 11: Yes! [in chorus]. Hundred percent it does. … It’s for employment, too. … It’s for safety, too.

The school executive was surprised to hear students drawing these detailed distinctions between more and less effective pedagogical practices. The surprise arose because previously conducted data collection efforts, including system-wide efforts such as the Tell Them From Me Survey (TTFM) administered by NSW Department of Education (2023), had not uncovered what was revealed by the use of IE as a mode of inquiry for ‘student voice’ work. The TTFM Survey is a tool constructed for collecting data on a large scale irrespective of school context or student characteristics. It is not able to provide collectivised vignettes of students’ contextualised experiences in particular classrooms, with any given teacher, or represent the nuances of pedagogy that these students spoke about. The IE approach employed in this study worked directly from student voices to trace the ruling relations that governed how students experienced learning. Schools in NSW are required to administer the survey to their students and refer to it in their 3-year school plans. There is no doubt that the survey questions have been carefully constructed and that the data collected are statistically reliable, however, it provides only one way of knowing about some aspects of the experience of students and parents. IE and student voice offer a supplementary approach that is sensitive to context.

Year 9 students shared a common perspective on how much and why they enjoyed their philosophy lessons.

Year 9: In philosophy, because there’s no right answer, so it’s better to discuss it and it makes us work together more than most other subjects…We could get a problem and there are different ways to answer it and different answers as well… So, our teacher would try to explain the problem and then give us time to talk to each other and discuss different answers. Around three or four people in a group…We can choose… You can also disagree with other groups and talk about your side as well… It’s good!

These comments about the pedagogy employed in philosophy lessons offered another form of surprise to the school executive. The comments challenged the perceptions held of the philosophy teachers’ pedagogical range based on other subjects taught by this teacher. In previous years, the school had implemented a professional learning strategy they called ‘lesson study’. A small group of teachers visited other teachers’ lessons for very short periods of time with no opportunity for the demonstrating teacher to brief or debrief what the observing teachers might have witnessed. Nothing that students reported as impacting on their capacity to learn was traceable to anything teachers, in this study, reported as having learned from these ‘lesson study’ moments. The lesson study moments may, however, have provided visiting teachers with a very limited view of their colleagues’ practice.

I asked the philosophy teacher how they had learned this approach to supporting student learning in philosophy.

Philosophy teacher: … for me the reason I wanted to bring philosophy into the school was that I did philosophy at uni and I found that it changed the way I learned. I looked at things that I’d dealt with previously, I looked at those same things in a very different way and certainly thought much more deeply about things. In doing that study at uni, I felt if only I’d been exposed to that earlier it would have changed the way I learned earlier rather than being so focused on exams and exam results and marks.. … I knew from the start that I couldn’t teach philosophy the way it’s taught at uni. …. So, it was about getting them to where I wanted to get them but much more slowly… the students were … told, each and every lesson, that there’s never a right answer, there’s never a wrong answer, so you shouldn’t be scared about giving an answer. It’s always about saying what you think, always making sure that you have reasons for why you think it.

The ‘health ed’ and ‘special ed’ teachers similarly credited their professional learning at university for setting their pedagogical direction.

Health Ed teacher: It pretty much stems from uni and what we found out and what we researched there. …I just try to think what the kids like and what could they relate to and what can they understand.

While two teachers in one school could hardly be considered a representative sample it was heartening, as a teacher educator dealing with the implications of The Education Ministerial Advisory Group (TEMAG) (2014) report, to have this concrete evidence of the effectiveness of initial teacher education.

Year 10 and year 11 students clearly articulated the importance to their continued learning of quality feedback on their work. Feedback and feedforward assisted them to see that learning was a continuous process of improvement.

Year 10: English… motivates you and gives you good feedback for all your work… She’s very concise and very detailed with her analysis of text and she ensures that all students understand what she’s talking about. There are no holes in her teaching.

The school executive was surprised that year 10 and other junior classes were commenting so frequently on the quality and prevalence of feedback/forward in English classes as assisting their learning. The Head English teacher, a member of the executive, was able to elucidate that the use of feedback/forward was an ongoing focus of teacher professional learning specifically related to Stage 6 (senior) English classes but even they were surprised that effects were spreading to junior classes. I spoke to several English teachers about these practices and how they were learning about them.

DT: How did you become aware of that, learn how to do it?

English teacher: … through marking and teaching Year 11 and 12.

DT: Marking here at school?

English teacher: Yes.. internally…We no longer put strengths and weaknesses on even our junior assessment tasks. We’ve moved completely towards feedback/feed forward. … Having that area for development means that you have to frame your feedback in a more constructive manner. It’s not what you did wrong, it’s what you do next.

Several teachers, including English teachers, spoke about systemic professional learning opportunities like Teaching English Language Learners (TELL) and courses catering for learners of English as an Additional Language or Dialect (EAL/D). The English teachers found these courses useful for the information they provided. Changed practice only occurred, according to them, when they had time to work together back at school to plan how they would put their learning into practice in relation to the current needs of their students. The most significant professional learning opportunity for the English faculty related by various members of the faculty was the contextual practice of working and learning together as they double marked and provided feedback on student work. The sharing of this work took place largely in dedicated time cyclically timetabled into ‘twilight professional learning’ sessions as part of the School Plan 2018–2020. Thus, the 3-year school plan was again revealed as a significant governing text of how things get done at the frontline of teaching and learning work. While this professional learning was mostly in relation to the work of Stage 6 students, it was clear from comments made by students in Stages 4 and 5 and teachers, that the teachers had adapted and applied their learning about the importance of quality feedback/feedforward to many of their junior classes.

Tracing student comments to their teachers and subsequent analysis led only to the English department as an example of a whole-of-faculty approach to transforming practice through contextualised professional learning (Talbot, 2015b) in direct response to student learning needs. In all other subject areas, teaching practice that impacted on student capacity to learn was reported by teachers as having resulted from their individual professional learning, sometimes in a school context but often as part of their initial teacher education or another university course. The example of the self-directed professional learning of the English department provided convincing evidence to the school executive that the School Plan 2018–2020 for ‘twilight professional learning’ sessions could have positive effects. It encouraged them to consider how they might provide guidance to collaboratively develop plans with other faculties in response to student comments. Before students were positioned by IE as knowers of their own experience and consulted as to what they perceived impacted their capacity to learn, the school executive had no concrete evidence that the professional learning experienced by teachers in twilight sessions impacted student learning.

Casualisation

The frequent use of casual teachers combined with what students perceived to be a lack of oversight of the practice of casual teachers was frequently mentioned, particularly by students in years 7–10 (junior high school), as contributing to poor conditions for learning. Students were dismayed by the high frequency of casualisation occurring in some subject areas and for particular year groups. The practice of casual teaching staff was frequently criticised by students as having negative implications for students’ capacity to learn.

Year 9: ... actually, I've had so many science teachers in Year 7 and 8, it was crazy. They kept leaving and my class was stuck with just a sub teacher.

Year 8: I think there should be a little bit more monitoring on how some teachers behave in classrooms. …Teachers on their phones, teachers on social media, teachers just not paying attention to the class.

Commonly, students were aware that their regular teacher had made careful provision for a planned absence. The students knew what work they were to expect to be given only to find that this was poorly executed or sometimes ignored by the casual teacher. When casual teachers spent time sitting at the front of the room ‘on their phones’ students felt left alone and uncared for. Students were mystified by their perception that no one, as in executive staff, ever seemed to check up on whether casuals were doing the job as expected. The tracing process of IE, from students as frontline knowers to teachers and to school executive allowed for the school executive to express their thoughts about knowing who their ‘good casuals’ were and to discuss difficulties with securing good casual staff. They were shocked by the perception of younger students that they were given casual staff more often than senior students because their learning was not as important. It was confirmed, however, by the school executive, that senior classes were prioritised for allocation of a teacher who was a permanent staff member rather than a casual teacher. Members of the school executive who had direct experience with the issues associated with hiring casual staff reminded me of the current shortage of teachers, especially in science and mathematics. They also spoke about the specific lack of casual teaching staff available in the geographical area of the school, south-west Sydney. They accepted that no process was in place to ensure standards of practice of casual teachers. It is beyond the scope of this paper, but it should be noted that shortage of teaching staff, permanent and casual, is a nation-wide workforce issue highly relevant to IE within a set of institutionalised social relations that directly impact on students’ capacity to learn.

Overwhelmingly for students, the most frequently occurring themes about what affects their capacity to learn were in the affective domain and related to the quality of the relationship with the teacher. Students experienced ‘caring’ through the pedagogical choices of their teachers. Teachers who observed their students for the purpose of assisting learning engendered feelings of care amongst students. It was difficult to separate discussion of pedagogical procedures from students’ discussion of their affective responses to them and simultaneously, to other school and classroom influences. Capacity to learn was highly connected to the way students feel. The ‘standard’ lesson of teacher explains the work, students complete the work mostly individually, teacher maintains order in the classroom, homework is set, seemed common to student experiences. Students accepted this as the norm if it was executed such that the classroom atmosphere was not intimidating and allowed them to get on with their work with one-to-one assistance as needed.

Physical conditions

Students frequently mentioned rooms in which they felt learning was inhibited.

Year 7: I'm in the STEM room where all the dirty (as in dusty, faded, torn) pictures are and dirty objects.

Year 7: (talking about the art room in response to a photo of students working in a rather beautiful art space) …the seats are uncomfortable because it’s kind of a stick and a plate… When you sit on there for 50 minutes it hurts… …when the weather is really hot, in spring and summer, the chairs get heated up and they’re really hot.

I wanted to know what conditions they thought made a positive contribution to their learning.

Year 10: With a lot of windows because a lot of our rooms are musty. Maybe light… Aircon… I think aircon is a big one because I can’t work in heat and especially on a really hot day it’s very hard to concentrate and study. …there’s very limited fans as well so there’s either one or two in a classroom and some don’t work.

Not surprisingly, students reported that their capacity to learn is enhanced in clean classrooms where the air is fresh and cool, there is room to move around without disturbing the work of others, and the furniture is comfortable. Sadly, such rooms, according to students, seemed to be the exception rather than the rule. This is not to say that learning can only occur in ‘state of the art’ facilities, but it draws attention to the widening gap between high and low socioeconomic government schools, based on parent contributions (Rowe & Perry, 2019) and of course, between funding for non-government schools, particularly for capital works by the federal government, and funding available to state government schools (Australian National Audit Office, 2022). Interestingly, the School Plan 2018–2020 is silent on the topic of facilities in which learning might occur.

It is important to critique here the possible effect of the photo elicitation method on what students had to say. Most of the images I provided to students depicted classroom conditions for learning that were somewhat ideal. I acknowledge that acts of research are entanglements between researcher, the object of research, and the apparatus selected to make observations and produce findings. The researcher’s involvement in the apparatus in choosing images makes a cut which distinguishes what it is possible to know from that which cannot be known (Hayes et.al, 2020). It is likely that the images influenced student talk about material conditions for learning more than they did for either pedagogy or relationship with teachers.

The approach to student voice, taken in this study, may be assessed by some as one which treats students as data sources rather than involving them in meaningful and democratic decision making about their own learning lives. I counter this by drawing attention to the way in which the study envisaged enactment of matters raised by students’ voices. My intention was to trace what students had to say through their teachers to school structures and documents that influenced how the work of learning happened in this school. The purpose being to encourage and advance the work of the school executive in directions that were already, or had potential to positively influence, according to students, their capacity to learn.

Conclusion

The school executive was surprised by the pedagogical insights provided by students where they contradicted executive assessments of some teachers’ ‘quality’ and/or the factors that contributed to the esteem in which teachers were held by students. The IE approach taken in this study began from the standpoint of students. Consultation with students was followed by tracing their comments to the teachers they mentioned, providing direct evidence of the positive impact of certain forms of teacher professional learning on students’ capacity to learn. Most notably, the professional learning that had been supported by the School Plan 2018–2020 through designed-in school timetable structures allowing teachers to work on contextual problems of practice. The school executive was reminded that unpleasant physical conditions for learning are not a minor consideration for students who have no relief from them throughout the day, day after day. Unfortunately, the limited funding provided to government sector schools by governments for capital works and acquisition places severe constraints on what even the best school executive can plan to change.

The study demonstrated the efficacy of an IE approach beginning with the voices of students to uncover a broad range of student views about factors that they perceive affect their capacity to learn. Importantly, the approach acknowledges student learners as knowers of their own learning experiences. It allows students to bring their priorities to the forefront of evaluation and planning discussions rather than limiting students to providing data only on the specific foci of more traditional forms of survey research. The governing capacity of the school plan should not be under-estimated. This study demonstrated, to the school executive, the productive potential of a school plan informed directly by the voices of the students, and teachers, for supporting actions aimed at enhancing students’ capacity to learn.