Sarah Robinson

Universities around the world face a number of pressures. To cope with these pressures the language of entrepreneurship and innovation has arisen out of neoliberal ideologies. However, in some contexts, especially in Scandinavia, entrepreneurship has been re-defined to encompass a wider set of values than just the economic. Value today is most often thought of as economic value. But the role of the university could be to discuss what do we value. Learning focused around the things a society values involves a dynamic process of becoming for students and faculty. Students should be re-integrated into the core of knowledge production and creating new values. This is a process of transformation, of becoming for the students, where they act upon the world, take risks and grapple with the new, transforming themselves through the process. It is an agentic process that benefits both the individual and the communities they work with.

Drawing on agency literature, this paper demonstrates how teachers' professional agency emerged when seemingly conflicting strategies were imposed on them in policy reform. Policy discourse is often linked to performance and accountability measures, which teachers respond to in a number of ways. Some education researchers identify tensions caused by such strategies; others warn that if outcomes are defined by mechanical techniques that are practised and imposed rather than constructed and negotiated then there is a danger that teachers will be reshaped as technicians. A number of debates discuss de-professionalism, the erosion of status and new definitions of the role of the teacher. This ethnographic study examines how the implementation of policy requirements for writing student reports, stipulated by two levels of government, emerged through the practices of the teachers in an Australian non-government school. The analysis of the data is located within the policy in/as practice literature. The evidence illustrates that, despite the strategies of performance, accountability and control mechanisms in policy text, the presence of strong collegial relationships enabled the teachers to construct their professional agency by adaptation and adoption of policy requirements to fit some practices and reshape others.

The interest in teachers’ discourses and vocabularies has for a long time been studied under the rubric of knowledge, most notably teachers’ professional knowledge. This interest can be traced back to Shulman’s distinction between different kinds of teacher knowledge and Schwab’s interest in the role of practical reasoning and judgement in teaching. Within the research a distinction can be found between a more narrow approach that focuses on teachers’ propositional or theoretical knowledge and a more encompassing approach in which teachers’ knowledge is not only the knowledge for teachers generated elsewhere, but also the knowledge of teachers. This is the ‘stock of knowledge’ gained from a range of sources and experiences, including teachers’ ongoing engagement with the practice of teaching itself. In this paper we focus on the role of teachers’ talk in their achievement of agency. We explore how, in what way and to what extent such talk helps or hinders teachers in exerting contro...

Drawing on agency literature this paper demonstrates how teachers’ professional agency emerged when seemingly conflicting strategies were imposed on them in policy reform. Policy discourse is often linked to performance and accountability measures that teachers respond to in a number of ways. Some education researchers identify tensions caused by such strategies others warn that if outcomes are defined by mechanical techniques that are practiced and imposed rather than constructed and negotiated then there is a danger that teachers will be re-shaped as technicians. A number of debates discuss de-professionalism, the erosion of status and new definitions of the role of the teacher. This ethnographic study examines how the implementation of policy requirements for writing student reports stipulated by two levels of government emerged through the practices of the teachers in an Australian non-government school. The analysis of the data is located within the policy in/as practice literature. The evidence illustrates that, despite the strategies of performance, accountability and control mechanisms in policy text, the presence of strong collegial relationships enabled the teachers construct their professional agency by adaptation and adoption of policy requirements to fit some practices and reshape others.

This ethnographic study captures the processes that led to change in an Australian public education system. The changes were driven by strong neo-liberal discourses which resulted in a shift from a shared understanding about leading educational change in schools by knowledge transfer to managing educational change as a process, in other words, allowing the schools to decide how to change. Inside an Australian state education bureaucracy at a time when the organisation was restructured and services decentralised, this study helps show some of the disturbing trends resulting from the further entrenchment of neo-liberal strategies. Although control was re-centralised by legitimising performance mechanisms, in the form of national testing, there are indications that the focus on national tests may have alarming consequences for the content and context of education. I argue that the complexities of learning and fundamental pedagogies are being lost in preference for an over-reliance on data systems that are based on a shallow and narrow set of standardised measures.

The apparent simplicity of ethnographic methods
studying people in their normal life setting, going beyond what might be said in surveys and interviews to observe everyday practices
is deceptive. Anthropological knowledge is gained through fieldwork and through pursuing a reflexive flexible approach. This study carried out in a nongovernment primary school in Perth,Western Australia focused on the processes used by the teachers to implement reporting policy. The focus of this paper is not on the data of the research, but on the experiences of a researcher in the field for the first time. Despite being aware of what Schweder (1997) describes as the need to be open to the surprise of
ethnography, the events which followed my first hours in the field still managed to disturb my equilibrium as they proceeded to unfold in unexpected ways. The factors which influenced the outcome of the research were serendipitous and for the researcher were vital in my initiation into ethnographic methods.

Keywords: ethnographic methods; fieldwork preparation; educational research; policy

This chapter suggests that teaching students an ethnographic approach could be an important way to explore how societal issues could be understood through their disciplinary knowledge. As higher education institutions have increasingly come under criticism for failing to equip students for a fast changing and unpredictable future, the role and purpose of the future university has come under debate (Barnett and Bengtsen, 2018). In response, discourses about entrepreneurial mindsets, attitudes and competences have flourished. These discourses have further anchored the structures and management of the institutions in line with neoliberal ideology. In fact, it seems that neoliberalism has captured some of these concepts and used them to further entrench neoliberal strategies. For example, the entrepreneurial university has become equated with the corporatization of the university (Shore and Wright, 2017) and teaching entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial competences have become integrated across the university as being about encouraging students to create business ventures. Interestingly, in Scandinavia, entrepreneurship researchers and educators have been working with a broader definition of entrepreneurship that is about creating different kinds of value. In Denmark, this broader perspective on entrepreneurship and value has led to the development of a changemaker model that has been the basis for some teaching in the Humanities at Aarhus University. In this model, ethnography is used to explore how social practices are formed and shaped. Using ethnography in teaching helps students engage with their disciplinary knowledge.