Abstract
One of the outcomes of the new compulsory schooling age is the impact on teachers’ work. This policy shift came when neoliberal processes of testing and standards permeated all aspects of teachers’ work. It came at a time when professional capacities were undervalued, when work satisfaction was seriously undermined by lack of control, and at a time when there was less and less money to provide for professional development. One of the key findings of this study is how the new compulsory schooling age has intensified these effects through the demand for ever-increasing diversification. A number of teachers were taking on courses—multiskilling—to teach the students in alternative pathways, while trying to hold on to their key curriculum area. Not all disliked this shift, but many were finding it hard to adjust. Many mourned the loss of the teacher—student relationship that was part of the joy of teaching in the senior years. An intellectual engagement was desired with the students, instead of policing the disaffected with attendance registers, forms for truancy, appointments with parents, and a multitude of administrative processes developed to enforce the compulsory schooling age. In this chapter the teachers’ responses to the NSLA are firstly canvassed, followed by their descriptions of the impact on their practice and finally the potential or otherwise of new pathways.
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Notes
R. Connell, Confronting Equality: Gender, Knowledge and Global Change (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2011), 73.
M. Maguire, “Towards a Sociology of the Global Teacher,” in The Routledge International Handbook of Sociology of Education, ed. M. W. Apple, S. J. Ball, and L. A. Gandin (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010), 58–68.
Ibid., 60.
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S. J. Ball, “The Teacher’s Soul and the Terrors of Performativity,” Journal of Education Policy 18, no. 2 (2003): 218.
R. Connell, “The Neoliberal Cascade and Education: An Essay on the Market Agenda and Its Consequences,” Critical Studies in Education 54, no. 2 (2013): 107.
Ibid., 108.
Ibid., 107.
M. D. Power, The Audit Explosion (London: Demos, 1997).
C. Campbell, H. Proctor, and G. Sherington, School Choice: How Parents Negotiate the New School Market in Australia (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2009).
M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (London: Penguin, 1977).
M. Dovemark and D. Beach. “Academic Work on a Back-Burner: Habituating Students in the Upper-Secondary School towards Marginality and a Life in the Precariat,” International Journal of Inclusive Education 19, no. 6 (2014): 583–594.
T. Wrigley, P. Thomson, and R. Lingard, Changing Schools: Alternative Ways to Make a World of Difference (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2011).
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© 2016 Carol Reid and Katherine Watson
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Reid, C., Watson, K. (2016). I Just Want to Teach My Stuff. In: Compulsory Schooling in Australia. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137518132_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137518132_6
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