Education, Inequality And Social Identity

Education, Inequality and Social Identity

Education, Inequality and Social Identity Edited by Lawrence Angus

The Falmer Press (A member of the Taylor & Francis Group) Washington, D.C. • London

USA The Falmer Press, Taylor & Francis Inc., 1900 Frost Road, Suite 101, Bristol, PA 19007 UK The Falmer Press, 4 John St, London WC1N 2ET © Selection and editorial material copyright L.Angus 1993 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without permission in writing from the Publisher. First published 1993 This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” A catalogue record of this publication is available from the British Library ISBN 0-203-97387-9 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0 75070 172 2 cased Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data are available on request Jacket design by Caroline Archer

Contents

Series Editor’s Preface

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Introduction

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Educational Inequality and Cultural Conflict Bruce WilsonJohanna Wyn

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Re-visioning Empowerment with the Research Subject and the ‘At Risk’ Mary O’Dowd

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Women in a Male Domain: Gender and Organizational Culture in a Christian Brothers College Lawrence Angus

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Cool Guys, Swots and Wimps: The Interplay of Masculinity and Education Robert Connell

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Inside the Disadvantaged Schools Program: The Politics of Practical Policy-making Vivian WhiteKenneth Johnston

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Cultural Perspectives on Work and Schoolwork in an Australian Inner-city Boys’ High School James Walker

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Reproducing Vocationalism in Secondary Schools: Marginalization in Practical Workshops Robert Mealyea

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List of Contributors

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Index

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Series Editor’s Preface

Ethnography is often portrayed by its critics as ‘soft-edged’. Inasmuch that it is based on ‘taking’ rather than ‘making’ problems it can be seen to fail to address major social problems in favour of smaller scale personal worries. But not all ethnography is like that. This book is not like that. After all, C. Wright-Mills argued that the promise of the sociological imagination lies in the linking of personal troubles with social issues, specific milieux with structural changes. Good ethnography does not have to be short sighted. When well done it can ‘deliver the goods’, in Wright-Mills’ terms, more effectively than many other social science methodologies. This collection is concerned with inequality; poverty, social class, gender (male and female) and ethnicity. It explores identity construction, changes in social relations, life histories, and the social and cultural roles of teachers. There is also a strong reflexive theme running through the papers. Some of the major figures in Australian qualitative research are represented here and the collection as a whole provides a crucial, state of the art overview of the contribution of ethnography to our understanding of the experience and processes of inequality in education and the construction of diverse social identities. Stephen J. Ball King’s College London University of London

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This book is a collection of papers written by Australian ethnographers who are exploring issues of education and inequality in Australian society, and ways in which inequality can best be investigated and combatted. In individual chapters, authors reflect upon major studies or ongoing projects with which they are engaged. Chapters are not summaries of the larger studies or projects, but they do indicate their nature and flavour, and convey a sense of their thickness and richness. Each chapter has its own unity and argument, although major substantive, theoretical or empirical issues that have arisen from the large projects, or in the authors’ reflection upon them, are addressed. In short, authors have generally reflected upon their theoretically-informed, methodologically interesting and substantial ethnographic projects in ways which throw light upon particular aspects of education and inequality. Educational inequality has been a major focus of researchers in Australia and elsewhere for several decades. Mainly, the research has focused on the impact of poverty, social class, gender or ethnicity on the educational opportunities and outcomes of young people. In this book, class, gender and ethnicity are still regarded as crucial but the emphasis is upon lived experience, subjectivity and identity formation in the constructions of relationships which are characterized by or contribute to forms of inequality. In some chapters the experiences of young people who seem disadvantaged in Australian society are examined. Others focus on the production of attitudes and subjectivities that sustain unequal treatment. This general issue is examined particularly in relation to the construction of gender attitudes. Ways in which teachers encounter and grapple with issues of inequality, and experience the effects of inequality on themselves and their students, are also investigated in several chapters. A common theme in this last group of chapters is the question of ‘what it means to be a teacher’ in such circumstances. The first two chapters deal in different ways with the experiences and identity constructions of young people. The opening chapter by Bruce Wilson and Johanna Wyn presents a reflective overview of an ongoing project in which a number of case studies have been undertaken in a longitudinal investigation of what the authors call ‘social division’. This term is a shorthand for the interaction of class, gender and ethnic relations which lead to or sustain patterns of advantage and disadvantage. Within their relational approach, Wilson and Wyn’s particular concern is with the impact of such interaction on educational outcomes and on young people’s sense of ‘livelihood’. This latter term encompasses the young people’s attitudes towards and expectations of gaining work or careers, and their sense of dignity and worth. The term is intended to capture an important element of the complex cultural identity of young people whose attempts to achieve livelihood, it is argued, are influenced by structural and cultural inequality. This perspective is illustrated by detailed

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INTRODUCTION

case studies of two young women, the case being taken from separate studies that are linked by the common themes of social division and livelihood. Both young women, from different backgrounds, experience forms of cultural conflict, but their different experiences illustrate contrasts in the circumstances and orientations of young people, and the variable impact of complex class and gender relations on people’s lives. Mary O’Dowd also investigates social division and social formation in her chapter on young people who are defined as being ‘at risk’. She reminds us forcefully that researcher interpretations and explanations of the nature of behaviour of the participants in ethnographic inquiry are extremely problematic. In the case of the young people in her research, not only were such interpretations likely to be wrong, but also disempowering of the young people being studied—even though her intention as researcher was to empower them. Through re-visiting participants and a ‘re-visioning’ of the research, this time informed by post-modernist and feminist perspectives, O’Dowd deconstructs the way in which her own perceptions and beliefs influenced both what she saw as a researcher and how she interpreted what she had ‘seen’. Such re-visioning leads her to a more complex yet provisional reinterpretation of the relationship between researcher and researched. It also enables her to reconceptualize the notion of ‘at risk’ from a holistic perspective and to consider the relevance of the reinterpreted findings to the problematic notion of empowerment of ‘victims’ of inequality in society. The following two chapters are concerned with changes in gender relations and the construction of dominant forms of masculinity in schools. My own chapter is an account of gender inequality and the formation of gender subjectivities. In it I reflect upon and re-visit data that were collected during a critical ethnographic study over several years in a Catholic School for boys. Earlier publications from that study, including my Continuity and Change in Catholic Schooling (Falmer Press, Lewes, 1988) which is also published in Falmer’s ‘Explorations in Ethnography’ Series, have been concerned mainly with constructions of social class, religion and high-status knowledge and their part in social and cultural production and reproduction. As in O’Dowd’s chapter, but without the researcher being centred as explicitly in the inquiry, aspects of the ethnography are reinterpreted in an attempt to explain the school as a site of production of masculinities and particular gender relations. Ethnography is employed as a means of organizational analysis, and gender dynamics are regarded as part of a contested and problematic organizational culture. Part of this organizational culture, according to the argument, is a ‘gender regime’, the ‘rules’ of which are sustained and recreated through participants’ everyday actions and discourses and also through largely entrenched expectations regarding, amongst other things, the type of Catholic boy that the school should produce, the nature of discipline within it, and its hierarchical organization. These are highlighted in the chapter and located in relation to broader social and gender structures by examining responses of women teachers to the gender regime they encounter and mediate at the school. The chapter concludes with a discussion of possibilities of organizational reform which may enhance greater gender equality. In the following chapter by Robert Connell, whose work on gender and power is drawn upon in my chapter, restrospective data on the life-histories of two groups of men—one from the working class and the other from more affluent backgrounds but engaged in environmental politics— illustrate ways in which the school is a site of both the construction and differentiation of masculinities. The data are drawn from a larger study of contemporary changes in masculinity in

INTRODUCTION

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which schooling is located in large social processes. For unemployed working-class men, ‘getting into trouble’ at school was part of a process of constructing masculinity through conflict with the institutional authority of the school. For them, the school, as part of the state, represented a power they could not participate in. For other working-class boys, however, the school afforded an opportunity for them to embrace a project of mobility. As an element of this, they constructed a masculinity organized around themes of rationality and responsibility that seem to be associated with the sense of professionalism that was more familiar in the backgrounds of the relatively affluent group. Members of the group of middle-class environmentalists, however, had generally rejected the abstracted knowledge and bureaucratic authority that largely characterizes ‘professional’ versions of masculinity. Many of this group had also encountered feminist texts and feminism, but their most common reaction to it was a demobilizing guilt. As Connell sees it, such data indicate that a major opportunity for educational action to address gender inequality exists. However, there are difficulties in designing appropriate educational strategies. Broadly, the evidence suggests that the effects of streaming and failure, authority patterns, the academic curriculum and definitions of knowledge that are generally encountered in schools have a stronger effect on the construction of masculinity than formal equity programs of courses dealing with gender. This suggests to Connell that curricula need to be designed which will broaden boys’ sources of information about sexuality and gender, and that programs need to be designed that involve more than open ended problem identification. They must allow for practical accomplishments in relation to gender issues. The final three chapters address in various ways the problematic social positioning and cultural constructions of teachers in schools. In the first of these, Viv White and Ken Johnston, like Connell, employ life histories in an attempt to gain insights into the formation and development of particular identities or cultures. White and Johnston present an examination of the major program that the Commonwealth Government of Australia has funded since 1975 in its attempt to combat inequalities in education. Their focus is upon the Disadvantaged Schools Program and the experiences of key educational activists who have worked within it. They examine the complex notion of ‘educational practice’ and the problematic question of ‘what counts as good educational practice within the contested assumptions and context of the Disadvantaged Schools Program’. The life histories reported in this chapter form part of a broader project in which mainly qualitative and ethnographic studies of aspects of the program are intended to provide a source of input into policy deliberations regarding its future. The activists, who, it is clear from this chapter, are influential in making, implementing, adapting and accommodating policy at multiple levels, reflect on their successes and failures in combatting inequality and on changes in their strategic thinking over time. The authors conclude with some comments about the policy significance of their study. An intensive ethnographic study over five years in ‘Stokeham Boys’ High School’, an ethnically diverse ‘disadvantaged’ working-class school in a crowded Australian urban setting, is reported in the next chapter by James Walker. Previous publications from the study, notably Walker’s influential Louts and Legends (Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1988), have been concerned with both the individual histories of boys and young men who participated in the ethnography, as well as with the identification and investigation of several broadly defined ‘youth cultures’ and ways in which these may have applications to curriculum. In his chapter written for this volume, Walker examines the intercultural relations between teachers and students at year 10 level at Stokeham. Their divergent

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INTRODUCTION

cultural backgrounds and perspectives, including differences induced by the social class and occupational backgrounds of teachers, were found to influence their attitudes to and participation in schoolwork and, in turn, the expectations and aspirations of students for future working life. Walker illustrates that broad notions of ‘being a student’ and ‘being a teacher’ were problematic at Stokeham. Educational outcomes were the products of strategies developed by both teachers and students. Some strategies led to cultural convergence and all of the strategies, Walker concludes, need to be understood in terms of their possibilities for engagement and the creation of options within the complex articulations which constitute the school as a social structure. One point that has been highlighted by many commentators on the reproduction of educational disadvantage is that a separation seems to occur in schooling between theory and practice, abstract and practical knowledge, head and hand. Because of the general dominance of the competitive academic curriculum, it is argued, abstract theoretical knowledge is generally privileged in schools and yet access to it controlled in such a way that social divisions are likely to be reinforced. In the final chapter Robert Mealyea indicates that it is not only educational elitists who support a distinction between abstract and practical knowledge. Mealyea claims that teachers of practical studies (trade subjects) engage in a complex process of identity construction in which their teacher training, past trade careers and socialization into the ranks of fellow trade teachers, produce a particular educational ideology which is characterized by narrow vocationalism. This claim is supported by evidence from his ethnography of a cohort of mature aged trainee teachers undergoing transition from tradesperson to teacher in Victoria. The study was conducted at a time when the Ministry of Education had released a set of proposals aimed at reforming traditional trade teaching in secondary schools. These encouraged a student-centred pedagogy and an emphasis on the ‘how and why’ of technological studies rather than on the acquisition of trade skills through the construction of useful objects from raw or processed materials. Mealyea shows how the trainees generally rejected the intentions of the reformers and closed ranks around a traditional image of ‘what it means to be a trade teacher’. The implications for educational inequality of a pedagogy which affirms manual work yet accepts and reinforces divisions between mental and manual work are discussed. Despite the somewhat different theoretical and methodological approaches displayed in the various chapters, all provide ‘explorations’ of particular issues and approaches in the study of inequality. There seems to be agreement from all authors represented here that inequality is in large part sustained by the construction of fragmented and diverse cultural identities which afford for their members differential access to status, knowledge and power in Australian society and social institutions such as schools. However, each of the chapters is informed also by questions about the nature of change. They are accounts of changing situations and of resistance to change in specific locales and contexts. The possibility of change which might contribute to greater equality is raised, not in the sense of direct policy prescriptions or applications but in the sense of alternative strategic possibilities for action for those who are victims of inequality or who seek to combat inequality.

1 Educational Inequality and Cultural Conflict Bruce Wilson and Johanna Wyn

Educational inequality has been a major priority of researchers in Australia for more than a quarter of a century. Generally speaking, they have focused on the impact of poverty, or of social class, or of gender, or of ethnicity or race on young people’s experience of education. Only rarely has research been conceptualized in a manner which has examined the impact of the interaction between the different dimensions of social division on educational outcomes. In 1982, Connell, Ashenden, Kessler and Dowsett published Making the Difference. The theoretical framework for their analysis relied on a concept of social division as a means of understanding the interaction of class and gender relations in shaping the educational careers and achievements of students from ruling-class and working-class families. Understanding the interplay of class relations and gender relations is one of the most difficult problems in the social sciences. There are deep problems about how to pose the problem in the first place, and what a solution might even look like… Both class and gender are historical systems, riddled with tensions and contradiction, and always subject to change. Indeed it may be better to think of them as structuring processes rather than ‘systems’, that is, ways in which social life is constantly being organised (and ruptured and disorganised) through time… The joint presence of gender and class, say for a working class boy, means a relationship between processes (Connell et al., 1982:179–81). Although the authors of Making the Difference do not take it far themselves, their introduction of the concept of social division has been very significant in directing attention towards a more sophisticated analysis of the lives of young people and their experiences of schooling. Their comparison of the family circumstances and the educational experiences of young people from ruling-and working-class backgrounds has illustrated that the ‘structuring processes’ to which they refer are marked not only by material differences but also by cultural conflict. Disparities in the material resources of different families clearly have significant consequences for the nature and extent of the participation of children in school (see Wilson and Wyn, 1989). However, the patterns of educational inequality reflect also the cultural conflict that is a fundamental part of social division, shaped not only by ethnicity and race, but also by the experience of class gender relations. The cultural significance of class and gender relations was readily apparent in our research on the ways in which young people approached the task of securing their adult status. The perspectives on school, work and relationships which young people expressed required a reassessment on our part of concepts drawn from conventional economics which has typically excluded the private realms of

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social life. Rather than giving analytic priority to forms of productive labour which earn a wage, we made use of a concept of livelihood, which enabled us to engage in an analysis which encompassed a more inclusive range of practices associated with adulthood. The contemporary demands of young people are not simply for a decent income but for work, the opportunity to demonstrate competence and make a contribution; not simply for an employment or training opportunity but to have a say in how it will be established; not simply to be part of the workforce, but to meet people and to develop friendships… This reveals the complexity of the goal of livelihood and that it cannot be reduced to a single element or ‘core’. While the notion of livelihood has a material basis (the need for a decent and respectable standard of living), its significance lies much more in the quality of life, the dignity and legitimacy which achieving a livelihood allows (Wilson and Wyn, 1987:12). The means by which young people obtain a livelihood are influenced significantly by the patterns of structural and cultural inequality. Schools are intimately involved in the processes of cultural formation, and as such, become arenas in which the tensions and conflicts of the cultural dimension of social division are of central importance. The kinds of knowledges, classroom language, teaching styles and assessment strategies which are given priority reflect values, assumptions and practices which operate in the interests of students from one type of background or another. Qualitative research methodology has proved a particularly useful means of exploring the cultural tensions which permeate the experience which many working-class young people have of schools. It has provided, in our research, distinctive insights into the perspectives which students (and their parents) from different backgrounds have on their schooling and their futures, and how they interpret the relationships between home, school and work. Shaping Futures (Wilson and Wyn, 1987) drew on evidence about educational inequality and livelihood possibilities that had been gathered cumulatively from six research projects. These issues are illustrated in this chapter, however, through a consideration of two case studies, both young women, taken from two different research projects, one undertaken in 1982 and the other in 1988. Although they differed in purpose, scale, and funding source, both projects were concerned with students in the middle years of secondary education and explored the orientations of young people towards their schooling and their futures. Both projects illuminated the scope and nature of social and educational inequality and the complexity of the material and cultural forces which shape educational participation and achievement. The two projects revealed a significant contrast in the circumstances and orientations of young people in the two periods. In particular, two dimensions to the altered circumstances are of relevance. The youth labour market has changed considerably through the 1980s, marked by a collapse in the full-time employment opportunities for young people. During the 1970s, unemployment amongst young people increased significantly, rising dramatically in 1982. Although there has been some improvement since then, the jobs that do exist are largely part-time with limited relevance for long-term career development (Sweet, 1987). The types of full-time employment that are available for young people, and their selection criteria, reflect a process of industry restructuring which has placed a priority on capital-rather than labour-intensive production.

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Secondly, the economic pressures on the majority of the population are much greater now, generally speaking, than they were at the start of the decade. Although employment improved overall during the decade, poor international trade figures, inflation, high interest rates and tight fiscal restrain have meant that a sense of economic uncertainty and impending doom have dominated discussions about public policy. An important consequence of both these trends has been increasing retention into the senior years of schooling of young people who would have preferred to enter the labour market instead. During the 1980s government policy has strongly emphasized the importance of encouraging as many young people as possible to complete a full secondary education (see Wilson and Wyn, 1987; and Wilson and Wyn, 1989). The two case studies do much more than provide a useful basis for a discussion of educational inequality. They demonstrate the very real impact which class and gender relations and economic crisis can have on people’s lives. The subjects of the case studies are not exceptional. Rather, they exemplify the stories of many ‘ordinary’ young Australians who must grapple with complex social and economic forces, as they strive to establish their legitimacy as adults in one social context or another. Some of the major theoretical and methodological issues which arise from this analysis of the experiences and views of these young people are explored in the latter part of the chapter. The Research Background Textbooks on methodology are often written as though the planning and implementation of a research project is a discrete activity, with a life of its own. In practical terms, however, the opportunity to conduct a single, self-contained project on the scale that is necessary to make a substantial contribution to empirical knowledge and theoretical development depends on having a level of resources and time which is only rarely available. Given that the resources for research have been increasingly constrained in recent years, there is a greater need than ever to ensure that research work is conducted coherently, so that more general concerns, issues and principles are pursued in successive projects. Qualitative research especially is time-consuming and demanding of human resources. Our experience has demonstrated that particular theoretical and policy issues can be explored through the application of qualitative research strategies across a series of projects, each of which has had more specific scope. Hence, our ‘explorations in ethnography’ have drawn on research projects undertaken with the support of contract funding: ‘small’ projects which have taken between three and twelve months, on a limited number of sites with two or three researchers working together. In each of these projects, there was an emphasis on gathering data on the family backgrounds of young people and their attitudes to school, ideas about future employment or other activities, and on understanding how the objectives these young people have for the future might be achieved. Our interests focused on exploring the relationships between family background and experience, gender and class relations, the strategies adopted for negotiating schooling, and the hopes of the young people for their futures. Data was gathered primarily from semi-structured and unstructured interviews; observation; and documentary materials. A key question throughout the projects was how analysis of the data on cultural conflict might influence the development of appropriate policy and practical initiatives. What were the possibilities of changing the community, school and classroom processes which contributed to the production

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and maintenance of social division in Australia? The following case studies have assisted us to formulate substantial responses to these questions. Two Case Studies The first case study was compiled in a project designed to report on student and parent perspectives on schooling. The project was part of a process of curriculum review amongst six post-primary schools within a particular sub-region, on the outer fringe of a large metropolitan area. Many students were from southern European backgrounds, mostly Macedonian, Italian and Greek, with parents who worked in the factories on the nearby industrial estates or in local businesses. Some had ‘white collar’ jobs in administration or as salespeople. Much of the curriculum was still based on traditional subject areas, but there was some opportunity for students to take more initiative in shaping their own learning (see Wilson and Wyn, 1987). Angela was 15 years old, in year 10. Her father was Macedonian and her mother from Greece, but both had lived in Australia for well over twenty years. Angela had two sisters, both younger than herself. She had been to Greece twice but, despite having had wonderful times there, she would prefer to live in Australia. Angela enjoyed her school and liked the teachers: They are helpful’. Whilst her friends also liked school, many would have preferred to leave and get a job. Angela herself was planning to stay at school for a couple more years partly because of her parents’ views but also because she was not clear about what she would want to do anyway. She was not happy at the thought that some of her friends might leave school, thinking: ‘I would wonder about whether I should go on or not but then after about a week or two I would be alright’. Angela had no clear idea about the sort of job she would want for herself. She had chosen to do work experience at a local kindergarten where ‘…we had little kids painting and drawing, fixing up jigsaw puzzles with them, things like that… I really enjoyed that so I have that in mind… You have to finish school and then do a three-year course’. She also wanted to explore computer programming as she had enjoyed her early contact with computers at the school. ‘We’ve got computers at school and last year we were doing these games on it and I liked it. It was good’. When it came to the crunch, school’s value to her depended on whether it helped kids to get a job. She had not given much thought to the question of leaving school before reaching year 12, and she seemed a touch confused about how the transition from school to work might be made: ‘Kids should stay at school until they get a job… School finishes at 3.30 p.m., you can look for a job then’. Her father worked as a cleaner for the state railways and her mother as a nurse at a hospital, but she did not know much about their work. While her mother was happy for Angela to become a kindergarten teacher, her father wanted her to be ‘something higher than that’. Angela: He wants me to be a high school teacher or a lawyer or something like that. Interviewer: And why do you say higher? Angela: I don’t know, it’s just how he says it. Angela persisted in wanting to be a kindergarten teacher. Getting employment was important to her, and she and her friends did spend a lot of time talking about ‘wanting jobs ‘n’ that’.

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Angela: We talk about jobs and what we really want to do ‘n’ that and we still don’t really know. We’re still sort of muddled up. There is so much to do and you don’t know what to do. A couple of years ago I wanted to do something and then I changed to something else and you just keep on changing, you don’t know. My friends change their minds. She did not know many unemployed people, and she was confident that she would be able to get some job or other. Angela: I’d look around. I don’t know, I would live with my parents and’ just look around for any sort of job if I could get that, and get that job so I’ll have that for support, all right, and then still be looking for a kindergarten job. At this point of her life, Angela’s experience was dominated by domestic concerns. She did not go out a great deal and when she did it was usually with her (male) cousins. She and her sister did most of the housework while her grandmother did most of the cooking. With respect to her own future she was somewhat ambivalent about domestic life. While the prospect of having children appealed to her, she was less enthusiastic about being married: Interviewer: What about getting married? Angela: Yeah, s’pose so. I’ll have to be…yeah, I s’pose I’ll have to. Interviewer: Why? Don’t you think you have a choice? Angela: Oh no, you have a choice, you have a choice. When it comes up, I’ll see…you hear a lot about divorces and fights, I mean really bad fights. I’m not looking forward to it. Angela anticipated that she would not keep her job once she had children although she would perhaps look for a part-time job once the children were at school. She could not accept that a man might care for the children while she continued to be employed. Angela: I wouldn’t really like it… I don’t think that a man can really handle looking after kids and doing all the housework and the washing and all that… The force of gender expectations seemed to sharply contradict her own priority on getting employment, but after all her choice of occupation was heavily influenced by her experience of what was worthwhile and what she would be able to do. In this context, her choice to be a kindergarten teacher makes reasonable sense. It would be a job which allowed her to explore relationships with children and other women. The issues of domestic life can be left until much later (Wilson and Wyn, 1987:28). The second case study, Ana, is drawn from a project undertaken across three states. Its main focus was on the significance of the costs imposed by schools on students in Year 9; how these costs could affect the choices made by families about educational participation (see Wilson and Wyn, 1989). Similarly to Angela, Ana’s parents were from Greek backgrounds, her mother having been born in Greece itself while her father was born of Greek parents in South Australia. The family rented a house with a workshop at the rear where Ana’s father ran a fibreglass manufacturing business. Her mother worked in the central administration of TAFE in South Australia and her aunt, who also lived with them, worked for a telephone answering service. Her father had worked previously as a

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teacher, a community worker and a radio station manager, before coming to manufacturing. Unfortunately, their business was struggling from a lack of capital to finance expansion. The family’s situation reflected the complex troubles that affected an increasing number of people in the early and mid-1980s. From early on in their marriage, Ana’s parents had used their savings to purchase properties, most of which were still being paid off. Because their capital was tied up in this way, the family had raised the resources for the fibreglass manufacturing business from the Commonwealth Bank. On the advice of one of the bank’s officers, they had borrowed in Swiss francs in 1984. When the Australian dollar collapsed in the international money markets in 1985, the debt almost doubled. On top of this, interest rates rose steadily. Hence, although they had substantial assets, they were unable to realize the value of the property as the amount raised would not get anywhere near towards clearing the magnitude of their total debts, and they were unable to borrow further in order to expand the business. The issue of employment was central for Ana. Although she received a small amount of pocket money each week from her parents, she sometimes had to help pay for petrol and other necessities. Her father hoped that she would get a part-time job when she turned 15, not just for the money but because he thought that she would become more responsible. Ana herself wanted to get work in a restaurant and her father encouraged her to think carefully about what she might want to do. The family often sat down and talked about their situation, but it was usually Ana’s mother who paid the bills. The family met its obligations by living frugally. Ana’s mother sewed her own clothes; they grew all their own vegetables; they never ate out; they didn’t have a car, except for a ‘51 Prefect which they bought for $200 and which still had to be done up; visits to the grandparents north of Adelaide could only occur once each year rather than four or five times. Ana and her brother attended Foothills High School in Adelaide, even though they lived on the other side of the city. Ana had begun her secondary schooling when it was their local school and after the family moved to their present address she had wanted to continue at the school because of her friendships, even though there was a lot of travelling involved. Ana was conscious of the difference between the costs of going to a government school relative to private school fees. Apart from food, clothing and medical expenses education was regarded as a high priority. Ana liked school because she was vivacious, had lots of friends and ‘likes learning something different each day’. Her initial results in year 8 were very good but they dropped a bit in year 9. Her teachers indicated that her performance had been average more recently, but acknowledged that she was possibly not working to her potential. This, it seemed, was at least partly explained by a degree of sexual harassment, of which her father was well aware. Father: Boys began picking on her after she had done well in year 8, teasing her and she suddenly stopped putting up her hand. There was a physical confrontation which led to a loss of confidence. The school dealt with the matter and Ana’s work began to improve. Her father was not too bothered by her results but wanted her to complete year 12 and to go to university. It was ‘her decision’ but his preference was for her to have a rounded education and to get a job that she really enjoyed, not just for the money. Her friends were a bit of a mixed bunch, but it seemed likely that most of them would go on to the end of year 12.

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Ana herself hoped to study medicine and to become a pediatrician or gynaecologist, or other specialist. She expected that she would be supported by her parents although she would also get a part-time job to assist with her expenses. Her father hoped that they would be able to provide some support for her, especially if she supplemented the family income herself. He hoped that the Aussie dollar would hold up at a reasonable level; if it slipped too far he might have to be declared bankrupt which would make it very difficult to support Ana at all. He also thought that it might be useful for her to take a year off after she left school, like other students whom he had known. He admitted to being somewhat anxious about her future as ‘she seems to be very happy at the moment and I worry about what’ll happen when she gets into the real world’. Ana’s family were an atypical case. Despite being reasonably well off in terms of assets, their income for living was limited so tightly that they had to live very frugally. Ana’s parents were obviously feeling the strain of heir situation; they perceived themselves as being rather poor ad felt entrapped, and their lifestyle was structured accordingly. Bankruptcy was an option which Ana’s father was not prepared to contemplate. However, their basic attitude to life and to each other remained warm and energetic, and their commitment to education was similarly very clear. The family had to live with very little yet there was never any question that Ana should be encouraged to stay at school for as long as possible with few constraints on her subjects or activities. Ana had set herself an ambitious target, educationally and occupationally. It was, in many ways, unknown territory both for her and for other members of her family. She was optimistic, nevertheless, about her chances of achieving her goals. Analyzing Cultural Conflict and Social Division The use of a case study approach has illustrated the complexity of processes of class, gender and ethnic relations, and the ways in which these processes interweave in people’s experience. Both were Greek young women, the same age, with parents in similar circumstances; yet their cases were marked also by significant differences. In Ana’s case, she was living in a family that had significant assets, yet had very limited financial resources on which to live on a daily basis. Nevertheless, she was aiming for a professional career. Angela’s priority was on getting employment, sooner rather than later, reflecting her parents’ experiences in the labour market and her understanding of the importance of employment in obtaining a livelihood. Both have grown up in households with Greek cultural traditions which have influenced their relationships with other ‘Anglo-Australian’ students and teachers. The experience of both young women in gender relationships was marked by tension and struggle. In Ana’s case, harassment from boys confronted her with the issue of gender conflict. Angela, however, was grappling with her future as a ‘working woman’ and possibly also a wife and mother, with fairly rigid gender expectations in which breadwinning was a male responsibility and childrearing an exclusively female concern. As she noted, with some vehemence Angela:

‘Cos I don’t think that men can look after little babies screaming their heads off all day… I don’t think he could handle it. Interviewer: How come a woman can handle it and a man can’t? Angela: ‘Cos…[pause] I suppose a man would handle it but a woman, she’s always been brought up to handle a family. I mean the guy has always had a welcome home ‘n’ that.

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If it was the other way round I think a man he just wouldn’t be able to hack it; ‘cos no matter how much he loves the kids, the woman will always feel more for them. With respect to their attitude to school, and to the relationship between school and the labour market, there were differences in Angela’s and Ana’s priorities and expectations which reflected the changes in the economic and social circumstances affecting young people between 1982 and 1988. Ana’s family were struggling to manage economically in the face of interest rates that could barely have been foreseen in 1982. The major issue arising from the study from which Ana’s case is drawn was that of the significance of the costs of secondary education to a large number of families. The great majority of young people in this study felt that they would need some other financial support in addition to their parents’ contributions, in order to meet the costs of completing their secondary, let alone tertiary, education (see Wilson and Wyn, 1989). Ana wanted to stay at secondary school to complete year 12. She liked learning for its own sake, relating her secondary education to tertiary study, rather than attempting to see links between her subjects at secondary school and ‘jobs’ in the labour market. Like Angela, her priority was on getting a job that she would find rewarding and she was prepared to stay in education in order to achieve it. However, the economic constraints on Ana’s family could easily jeopardize her hopes for future study, as the costs of secondary and tertiary education continue to rise. Angela and her friends, on the other hand, were able to contemplate leaving school before the year 12, and still have reasonable prospects of finding employment. Many of her contemporaries had ambitions of achieving professional careers, but this hope was always tinged with the view that they could always leave school and get an apprenticeship or even a job in a factory. This illustrates the way in which material circumstances (and educational policy) can interact with cultural processes, shaped by class, gender and ethnicity, to perpetuate social division. Student Perspectives on Livelihood A primary objective, methodologically, in these projects, and in our other research, has been to collect sufficient data to develop a thorough understanding of the perspectives which young people themselves have had on home, school and the labour market. These projects were certainly not the first to place a priority on collecting data related to students’ perspectives on schooling. However, the persistent focus on linking family (class) background and experience and their hopes for their futures with attitudes to schooling stimulated considerable interest, at a time when policy makers and other researchers were placing great emphasis on increasing retention rates and reducing youth unemployment. The projects demonstrated that young people are not mere puppets manipulated by teachers, parents, the media or their peers, but active contributors to shaping their own destinies. In every case, it became apparent that young people made decisions about their participation in school and their entry to the labour market, based on cultural perspectives and practices drawn from the class context of their neighborhood and their parents’ own perspectives and experiences of work. The emphasis was placed on extensive interviewing primarily because we were interested in exploring the complexity of students’ experiences and their perspectives on their immediate circumstances and their futures. This type of research allows us to address the relationship between the unique qualities of individuals and the patterns that recur across social groups.

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Consistent themes did emerge in the perspectives which young people brought to bear on their experiences of school, work and on their futures, albeit not without contradictions. We suggest that the consistency and persistence of these views reflects the structured inequality that is produced through the impact of class, gender and ethnic relations in our society (Wilson and Wyn, 1987:ix). Many young people expressed priorities which reflected understandings formed on the basis of their parents’ experiences of work (often in Australian factories) and from their own limited experience of the labour force. Generally speaking, their parents’ experiences of work in the factories had been fairly negative. Despite this, and despite the exhortations of their parents, most working-class young people wanted, in the early 1980s, to find jobs as soon as possible. This pattern, reflecting the experience of class and gender division irrespective of ethnic background, seemed to be of primary importance in understanding the orientations of these young people to their futures. Even though remaining in education might have been the key which would enable them to avoid the working conditions which their parents had borne, the association between having a job and being a legitimate, adult member of society was very strong. The prospect of obtaining good credentials was not sufficient to alter the conviction of many young people that, on the basis of their information about the labour market, they should get a job as soon as they could. In these cases, the priorities emphasized by working-class cultural perspectives proved to be extremely significant. One young man spoke for many of his peers when he said: ‘Cause all you really do in your life is eat, sleep and work, that’s all life is. If you didn’t work, what would you do with your life? I mean life is just the same thing over and over. I mean if there was no work you wouldn’t exist’. These perspectives influenced a primary commitment to obtaining employment even amongst the young women. However, having ‘a job’ was not the only means by which the young women saw themselves as obtaining a legitimate livelihood. This could be accomplished also through having a family, and most young women also had a sense of themselves as becoming mothers after they had had some experience of the workplace. One young woman commented, similarly to many others: ‘When I get married, I’ll give up work and spend all of my time doing housework’. The data revealed a complex process in which the very aspects of the parents’ experiences which led them to want their children to have a ‘better life than them’ also shaped a pattern of cultural formation which encouraged the children to follow in their parents’ footsteps. Dad’s hurt his back, he comes home dirty and aching, his hair’s fallen out and he’s gone old— Mum says don’t be like your father. More often than not, it was ‘like their fathers’ that many young men wanted to be, especially when the alternative was putting up with the offerings of schools which seemed to be profoundly unsympathetic to them. This manifested itself in the constant preoccupation of young people with getting jobs, and a frustration with enduring school long enough to get good, or ‘clean’ jobs. It soon became apparent to us that ‘getting a job’ stood for a much more complex cultural transition than had been apparent at first. A young Macedonian man said: ‘Mum and Dad want me to stay at school and not end up in a factory like they have. Factory jobs aren’t much of a sight—they want us to be better off than they are’.

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The real issue for young people was how they would manage the transition to legitimate adulthood. How would they be able to obtain an adequate livelihood for themselves as adult members of society: a decent material standard of living; a sense of personal dignity; the opportunities to establish social legitimacy; and the sense that they were worthwhile members of their society. One of our interviewees put it rather bluntly: ‘If you can’t get a job you sit at home getting fat and waiting for the money [unemployment benefit] to arrive until you don’t want to work any more.’ In more recent years, the contemporary pattern of structural and technological change, specifically manifested in the collapse of the youth labour market, has put at risk the prospect that young people in our society would be able to meet the criteria of adulthood successfully. This has raised the question, for both policy and strategic purposes, of how young people are going to obtain an adequate livelihood and establish themselves as adults, if the existing means of doing so were removed from their reach? The concept of livelihood, with its focus on dignity, legitimacy and social contribution, as well as material benefits, contributed to a more thorough analysis of social division in that it encompassed the realm of unpaid work and other, more marginal, forms of labour. In other words, the concept of livelihood allowed for an examination of the relationship between the processes of social division and a diverse range of practices associated with earning a living. It provided a broad framework for exploring the ways in which young men and women anticipate their futures, overcoming the typical marginalization of all practices not normally considered to be part of the formal economy. Student Perspectives on Schooling The expectations which young people from working-class neighborhoods had about schools seemed to change dramatically during the 1980s. Whereas many working-class young people wanted to leave school as soon as possible in 1982, by 1988 they were prepared to ‘stick it out’ until either they were guaranteed a position, had achieved a credential, or simply ‘couldn’t hack it any longer’. Across both periods, however, a commitment to friendship remained a fundamentally important aspect of their underlying attitudes. Time and time again, students would make comments such as: ‘School is very good. I’ve got lots of friends’. When pushed on why they really liked it, the response would be: ‘The kids. I like the kids, you know, you get to meet them, socialize’. By way of contrast, considerable criticism was directed at the actual knowledges that school offered. One young woman asked: ‘What’s history got to do with our future anyway?’ Another said: ‘For hairdressing I guess you need maths, for giving back the change’. Not only the labour market has changed during the 1980s. Many schools have developed a range of programs and teaching strategies which attempt to provide students with scope to adopt a more cooperative and active approach to learning. These programs have often had a clearly discernible effect. A teacher noted about one student: ‘For example, one student resists the pattern in school, but has been marvellous on the Community Studies days because she is working on her interests’. In making sense of the experiences of young people at school, understanding the effect of power relations was paramount. For example, the consequence of Jane’s decision (Wilson and Wyn, 1987: 17–21) to make her friendships a priority over academic success was her early entry to the labour market and vulnerability in the competition for scarce jobs. This pattern needs to be understood in

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terms of the exercise of power; this was implemented through the perpetuation of a particular set of values and competitive procedures in school which rewarded those who conformed and penalized those who did not. Although Jane made a choice (in favour of friendship), it was one which led, at least in the short term, to further subordination. This was not even a matter of disobedience or disruption; rather, Jane was left in a marginal position because her values and practices were not rewarded in the school’s terms. The very matter of who shall, or shall not, be selected for greater things can be construed as an act of power. As this example illustrates, social division and the power relations which it implies are an abstraction from the complexity of daily life. The concept can take on precise meaning only when it is applied to specific circumstances, which help provide a sense of process as well as structure. In analyzing these case studies, a particular benefit of the concept of social division has been its inclusiveness. It established a framework for considering a number of forms of structured relationship that might be relevant to understanding any one situation, ensuring that these forms were not analyzed in isolation from each other. In our projects the more significant forms of social division were found to be class and gender division. In other situations, a focus on ethnic or racial division might be a more useful approach, as was the case in Griffin’s (1985) study of young women in the UK. Student Perspectives, Social Division and ‘Difference’ In our research, the concept of social division had provided a more complex frame-work for analyzing the contrasts that exist within and between the material and cultural circumstances of groups in Australia. It highlighted conflict as well as dependence and mutuality, and the need to examine both the relationships between groups and the perspectives on those relationships held by different individuals and groups. The dynamics of gender, class, ethnicity and race can be separated conceptually, but the way in which young people experience the effects of social division is multilayered. It is difficult to find an example of class, gender or ethnic division that does not also have resonances of the others. Without denying the attempt by other researchers to systematize and clarify feminist or class analysis, the concern in this research has been to find an explanatory expression of the everyday experience of specific groups of people. Although the relative significance of class, gender or ethnicity might change from one situation to the next, our research has indicated that their interaction in people’s experience needs to be carefully considered in the implementation of programs for change. Explaining the patterns which appeared in the comments of the students could not be accomplished in a theoretical framework which gave a priori emphasis to either class, gender or ethnic relations. The concept of social division, on the other hand, drew attention to the relations of conflict and cooperation between different groups within the society. The advantage of a relational analysis was that it drew attention to the covert exercise of power in the interaction, for example, between males and females; it emphasized also the strengths, as well as the weaknesses, of apparently disadvantaged groups; it provided a framework for recognizing the links between individual experience and collective circumstances; and it enabled consideration of both the material and the cultural dimensions of people’s lives (see Wilson and Wyn, 1987:63–5).

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Although the views, experiences and perspectives of young people were the starting point for analysis, individual experiences gained another character when linked to the broader patterns of social division. While each student had their own story, it became apparent that their views could not be understood simply in their own terms. Recognition of this ambiguity has been important in understanding the perspectives of young people and a focus on the processes of cultural formation has provided a useful framework for the analysis of these issues. For example, there was a lot of resentment expressed by young women whose parents had emigrated from southern European countries, about the extent to which they were expected to contribute to the domestic labour of the household. Their resentment was frequently verbalized in relation to the different expectations held for their brothers. One young woman complained, I have two older brothers. One can’t be bothered doing homework and the other one is already doing uni, and he does homework, but he doesn’t get ‘you have to do that [housework] as well’. I have to help my mum and do all the housework and that. That has to be done as well as the homework, and sometimes my brothers and that will say ‘you don’t do anything’. I can’t stand that. Gender, class and ethnicity were interwoven inextricably in this young woman’s experience, and what seemed like a straightforward complaint is echoed by her classmates, as they also encountered family pressure to conform to a limited vision of womanhood centred on domestic life. Their frustration was all the more poignant because of the likelihood that in their circumstances, these young women would probably need to compete with their male peers for employment. Yet their dissatisfaction with the limitations placed on them was partial. There were many aspects of femininity with which they willingly conformed. Class and gender relations involve processes which constrain people, and at the same time provide a sense of identity and belonging. This kind of complexity associated with the production of social division reflects the way in which ‘difference’ is exploited in the power relations of class and gender. In schools, for example, the choice of specific criteria for reward and promotion exacerbates ‘differences’ and contributes to the marginalizing of the interests and values of one group to the benefit of another. However, the recognition and celebration of difference is also an integral part of identity. Although the social construction of gender leads to discrimination against women, establishing and maintaining femininity is a significant and valued aspect of most women’s identities. This suggests an explanation for the resistance which many young women make to programs for change which encourage girls to be ‘more like boys’. Angela provided a classic example of the tensions involved when she said, ‘Well if, um, a man stayed at home all day and looked after them, and like, they change jobs, well, I reckon he will—he doesn’t look as a man. He’d look more like a woman. Across all ethnic groups represented in these projects, gender difference has been important to the young people and to their plans for their futures. The meaning attributed to femininity and masculinity for both the young men and the young women was at times explained in terms of their ethnicity (‘we’re Greek, you see’). However, the problems raised by gender difference were faced by young people regardless of ethnicity. Although ethnic cultural traditions gave a particular emphasis to their views, their solutions were couched in much the same terms as young people from other

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groups. For example, the young women were interested in seeking work that would enhance their femininity while young men sought occupations that would confirm their masculinity. Within class relations, a similar pattern of inclusion and exclusion has developed around the cultural ‘differences’ associated with ‘mental’ versus ‘manual’ or formality versus informality (Connell et al, 1982:195; Dwyer et al, 1984:57). The choice of classroom pedagogy and the arrangements for assessment of students’ work give priority typically to literary and abstract forms of learning, thus favouring students from certain types of cultural backgrounds at the expense of others. Case Studies and Cultural Conflict Case studies have been a central feature of the methodology of these projects for several quite specific reasons, some of which relate directly to the ethnographic tradition. In the first place, case studies are most appropriate for collecting data which encompasses the complexities and the cultural dimensions of social and structural relationships. Secondly, focused, semi-structured and unstructured interviewing with parents, teachers, students and others, observation and documentary analysis can all contribute to data collection. Thirdly, a case study approach can be used to accommodate individuals, families, schools and communities, depending on the focus of inquiry. A sample of case studies can be stratified to take account of particular theoretical or empirical issues. Fourthly, the number of case studies can be reduced or expanded depending on the resources and time available. Fifthly, a case study methodology allows for systematic analysis across several projects, where the specific circumstances and dynamics uncovered in any one case must of necessity be explored both in their own terms and in relation to their context. The use of case studies also implies the use of a particular type of logic. The use of the ‘logic of case-studies’ as an analytical and reporting device has been discussed by Silverman: In a case-study the analyst selects cases only because he [sic] believes they exhibit some general theoretical principle. His account’s claim to validity depends entirely on demonstrating that the features he portrays in the case are representative not of a population but of this general principle (Silverman, 1985:113). Particular cases often portray important elements of the themes which can be identified across all the participants in a particular project. As Silverman comments, it is only possible to use the insights gained from this type of research to extrapolate to like situations ‘by logical inference based on the demonstrated power of our theoretical model’ (1985:114). The methodology employed in many of the projects has been innovative in response to external constraints, and in its reflexiveness, involving researchers and the researched in a process of constraints, and in its reflexiveness, involving researchers and the researched in a process of critique and assessment of what has been achieved. In each of the projects, there has been an emphasis on providing useful information and opportunities for reflection and action for the people in the situations being researched. At each site, the research methodology was negotiated with the adult participants, and increasingly, those who were the ‘subject’ of the research have also participated in devising and carrying out the research. This involvement by those being researched has meant that a

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wide range of research techniques has been employed, with the aim of producing knowledge relevant to the participants. For example, in one project, teachers have been asked to keep a diary of their thoughts about their classes, as a means of personal reflection about pedagogy. A variation on this has been to record thoughts on to tape, which can then be transcribed. This type of recording of teachers’ understandings about their work has been analyzed in the context of observation of their classes by a researcher, and interviewing of students who participated in the classes. In two studies, a longitudinal method has been used, recording the reflections young people have about their experiences of school and work over a period of time (in one study, up to three years). Increasingly, the methodology has involved the use of workshops of teachers and other researchers, to reflect on the data gathered at a certain point, and to facilitate decision-making about further directions for research and reporting. Conclusion Our ‘explorations in ethnography’ have provided the means for generating considerable understanding of how the cultural conflict which many young people experience in the arena of schooling can contribute to educational inequality. Many students can articulate a quite profound critique of their schools and their relevance for their futures. This often comes as a surprise to many teachers and policy makers who have assumed that young people would see schooling as being in their ‘best interests’. The difference in the views of students and teachers (and parents) can help considerably in illuminating the nature of educational inequality because of the attention which it draws to the cultural dimension of social division. Since 1972, with the establishment of the Australian Schools Commission, Australian governments have maintained a significant policy commitment to the objective of reducing educational inequality: all children should be able, at least, to start the ‘race of life’ from the same line. Whilst a dramatic improvement has occurred in the proportion of young people who complete their secondary education throughout Australia, there continue to be significant differences in educational outcomes for children from different backgrounds (see Williams, 1988). The patterns of inequality remain, despite the expenditure of considerable funds and a great deal of energy. Yet the reality has been that programs for change have focused for too long on addressing the distribution of material resources and have been guided by an ideology of compensatory education which has understood the poor performance by children from different group in terms of ‘deficit’ theory. The evidence gathered in our research, however, has demonstrated that young people from all social backgrounds come to school with complex perspectives that are grounded in the particular experiences and cultural life of their parents, themselves and others in their neighbourhoods. Their response to schooling is in itself a complex matter, reflecting an intricate process of negotiation between the values and practices accepted within the institution of the school and the understandings and practices which young people are developing in ‘another life’ (see Connell et al, 1982). The variety of situations and views which we have encountered amongst the participants in our projects has heightened our awareness of the ways in which social life is constantly being organized, disrupted and shaped by the intersecting processes of class, gender and race relations and ethnicity.

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The use of qualitative research methods has provided a valuable means for capturing the implications of the process of social division for individuals and groups at particular points of time. Analytically, the link between individual experience and social context has been conceptualized through a framework which is especially sensitive to process and interrelationships. We have drawn attention here to the relational nature of social division, encompassing class, gender and race, and have indicated the value of the concept of livelihood as a strategy for comprehending the various means by which young people see themselves as securing their legitimacy as adult members of their community. An important aspect of our use of qualitative research has been to take the views of young people seriously. The cultural dimension of social division is central in shaping the processes and outcomes of schooling. The broader recognition of the complex nature of this process in the development of school structures and curriculum could contribute significantly to addressing the conflicts and contradictions felt by many students. The ultimate test of this aproach would be the social and educational outcomes for young people: Do the programmes help to ensure that young people will be assured of a livelihood in a context which helps to challenge the existing structure of social division?… The priority that young people themselves place on establishing their legitimacy as adult members of the society implies that the ultimate responsibility for fashioning a livelihood must rest with them, both as individuals and as members of a particular community (Wilson and Wyn, 1987:131). References BETTER LIFE THAN THEM (1983) (videotape), Melbourne, Transition Education Advisory Committee/ Vocational Orientation Centre. CONNELL, R.W., ASHENDEN, D., KESSLER, S., and DOWSETT, G. (1982) Making the Difference: Schools, Families and Social Division, Sydney, Allen and Unwin. DWYER, P.J., WILSON, B., and WOOCK, R.R. (1984) Confronting School and Work: Youth and Class Cultures in Australia, Sydney, Allen and Unwin. GRIFFIN, C. (1985) Typical Girls? Young Women from School to the Job Market, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul. SILVERMAN, D. (1985) Qualitative Methodology and Sociology, UK, Gower. SWEET, R. (1987) The Youth Labour Market: a Twenty Year Perspective, Canberra, Curriculum Development Centre. WILLIAMS, P.N. (1988) Research on Poverty and Education: Australian Descriptive Research 1979–87, with a commentary and policy implications by R.W.CONNELL and V.WHITE. Report 1 of the Poverty, Education and the DSP Project, Macquarie University, Sydney. WILSON, B., and WYN, J. (1987) Shaping Futures: Youth Action for Livelihood, Sydney, Allen and Unwin. WILSON, B., and WYN, J. (1989) Educational Costs Borne by Year 9 Secondary Students, Report to the National Youth Affairs Research Scheme, Hobart, National Clearing-house for Youth Studies.

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2 Re-visioning Empowerment with the Research Subject and the ‘At Risk’ Mary O’Dowd

Overview This chapter is in three parts. In the first section I discuss the findings of ethnographic research about an alternative lifestyle involving young people at risk. In part two I discuss my follow-up research and draw conclusions about empowering those regarded as at risk from a social and psychological perspective. In part three I describe a theoretical framework that relies substantially on systems theory of the second generation (Rittel, 1982). It is a reflexive analysis of the research described in parts one and two. The philosophical perspective which underpins the theoretical framework is consistent with the emerging post-positivist tradition that uses deconstruction ‘…to distance us from and make us skeptical about beliefs concerning truth, knowledge, power, the self and language…’ (Flax, 1987:624). I attempt to deconstruct the way in which my own perceptions and beliefs influenced and shaped what I saw as a researcher. I apply de Beauvoir’s (1949) construct of ‘otherness’ to indicate how I had constructed the at risk. I then re-vision my research by applying ideas from systems and feminist theory to develop conclusions about empowering the at risk involving: (1) Constructs are a way of seeing and not seeing (I apply this to a worker cooperative and argue there is no one or neutral reality. I indicate how the researcher’s experience and background influence how and what is seen and constructed as reality). (2) The implications of the patriachial researcher/worker viewing the subject as an ‘other’. (3) The relevance of membership, acceptance and community on a social and psychological level to the at risk. Finally I discuss the concept of ‘at risk’ from a holistic perspective and consider the relevance of the findings to empowerment in society. Definition of terms Slavin et al. (1989:4–5) describe the at risk as, …certain category of students. The meaning of this term is never very precise, and varies considerably in practice. One possible definition is that students who are at risk are those

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who, on the basis of several risk factors, are unlikely to graduate high school. Among these risk factors would be low achievement, retention in grade, behaviour problems, poor attendance, low socio economic status and attendance at schools with large numbers of poor students. All of these factors are closely associated with dropping out of school. In this chapter I use the term at risk to describe young people from the above background. I look at these young people after they have left school and become further ‘at risk’ in our society as they form a part of a new underclass (another loosely defined term): …the term underclass is used loosely and broadly…[it includes]… Unemployed, underemployed, out of the labour force and/or engaged in illegal activities… Recently the term underclass has been extended by some to include the homeless, de-institutionalised mentally ill (Miller, 1989:225). My ethnographic research on the at risk focused on a worker cooperative used by young people who had dropped out of school. Part 1: The Worker Cooperative, ‘The Shop’ My interest in alternative economic and social systems led me to make my first contact with The Shop which I heard was a workers’ cooperative. The Shop was founded by people with an idealistic and Christian humanitarian philosophy. The ideals and humanitarian concepts, including cooperation, accorded with my own views so I was sympathetic to its aims. In my ethnographic research I collected the data, and described and interpreted the reality of a worker cooperative using the standard criteria of substantiating data received from, for example, Becker (1961); Glaser and Strauss (1968); Rist (1977); Ball and Kemmis (1982); Vidich (1955); Schwartz and Schwartz (1955); and Miller (1952). The research was much as Becker (1961:17–32) described it, as one who follows those he studies through their daily round of life, seeing what they do, with whom and under what circumstances and querying them about the meaning of their action. My purpose for doing this was to build up a body of field notes and interviews that captured patterns of collective action. In this I was aware of the dangers of becoming too involved with any particular group one is observing. Miller (1952) reported on the dangers of over involvement from personal experience in his study of union leaders: ‘…[S]ome penetrating lines of inquiry had to be dropped…for fear of opening severe conflict areas. Once established, shifting “rapport” to a lower level would induce distance and distrust’ (p. 98). I was engaged in overt participant observation research at the co-op; the members agreed to my research taking place. The participants referred to the co-op, typically, as ‘The Shop’, as the cooperative was a shop that packaged and sold nuts, dried fruit and chocolate nuts. These products were normally sold on ‘nut rounds’ in the city and suburbs by The Shop’s members who took the goods into offices. The members shared the profits. I became a member of the co-op and was a nut seller. I had initially intended to study the social context of, and reasons for, the abundance of graffiti at The Shop: to see who wrote, what they wrote and why. But as Becker (1961) noted the initial

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research project can change as some more interesting themes emerge. It became clear that the graffiti were a manifestation and a covert indicator of the feelings, tensions, conflicts between sub-groups within The Shop, and it became the focus of the research. This meant a much more interesting study developed of people in an ‘alternative reality’. (The term has been used by a variety of writers such as Rigby (1974), Cock (1979), Black (1984) and Metcalfe (1986) to describe communities outside the mainstream economic system that provide social and economic alternatives.) There were several key individuals involved in establishing and developing The Shop. Mary, a Christian, founded the co-op in 1980. About the same time she established a house where young people who had been out of home1 could stay. Peter, Nik and other young people from the house and their friends formed the initial core of those who dropped in. Joseph and Carl were anarchists who got involved in 1981. Both anarchists were politically active during the Vietnam moratorium in the 1970s, and were jailed. John was another core member. He was from England and later became an illegal immigrant when he over-stayed his visa because of his involvement with The Shop. Mary’s idea was to assist young unemployed to earn an income and to provide a place where they could go and be accepted and obtain emotional support. When asked if her motives were economic she replied, ‘Good God no. The idea was to combine energy and money. Christian money with unemployed energy’. The Shop developed a drop-in function for a variety of people. Difference in an Alternative Reality The varied backgrounds of the people involved made The Shop an incredibly interesting and dynamic place. There were between twenty and thirty people actively involved at any one time and another twenty to fifty people who had some contact. These included sub-groups who identified themselves as anarchists, Christians, travellers, Nyoongahs2 and street kids (who were a part of a larger group of young people who were out of home), ‘ex’ (de-institutionalized) psychiatric patients, homosexuals and people with disabilities. I focused my analysis on the young people out of home and the anarchists and Christians. The people at The Shop perceived themselves and The Shop as different. Carl, an anarchist, saw the co-op as: ‘Arthurian—a small group of people set in a struggle against the times’. Others did not see its political and economic difference as primary, but stressed their collective social nonconformity. Joseph, who was an ex-bomber, said: ‘We’re the most amazing collection of social outcasts working together on one project that you’ll probably ever see’. No one described the group as law breakers but this was a theme that emerged covertly in some descriptions. Peter spoke about those he lived with, most of whom were involved in The Shop, as: ‘… illegal immigrants, barbiturate addicts, all sorts, prostitutes, drug addicts, gays: nearly all got involved at The Shop’. Some members just saw themselves as lone individual outsiders from the dominant system. For example, Dusty stated; ‘I don’t put a label on myself but I guess I’m a bit of a social outcast’.

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Table 1 Individuals’ view of the social world

Source: Abridged table from Rigby (1974:50).

Nik indicated her own sense of difference and the internal differences between the Christians in The Shop and the young people. She described how Jo, a Christian, had ‘…never experienced drug addicts, alcoholics—people like us’. Other people involved described themselves as: ‘alternative’, ‘non-conformist’, ‘outcasts by necessity or choice’. The Shop, therefore, was viewed by the members as a ‘different’ alternative place. (An unobtrusive indicator of the different operating values accepted in The Shop was the acceptance and endorsement of graffiti which was almost everywhere on the walls, table and doors). As a cooperative it was an attempt to establish a viable social and economic alternative to the mainstream economic system, to establish an alternative lifestyle which was different to the hierarchical, competitive, mainstream capitalist system. It was a place where people perceived they had greater control over their working lives and were encouraged to be actively involved in decision making. Motivation Rigby (1974) analyzed the motivations of people attempting to establish alternative lifestyles. He used the terms ‘alienated’ and ‘estranged’ in assessing the reaction of the people to mainstream society—the capitalist system. Rigby employed Marx’s concept of the alienated man as an individual who fails to recognize his actions and the results of his actions as his own, and who believes in the existence of impersonal, determinate forces that shape and control individual and social life (1974:49). Rigby suggested that the alienated individual is not necessarily a psychologically estranged social being. This is because, while ‘alienated’ usually describes a person who is disillusioned with mainstream society and feels separate from it, ‘alienated’ also describes those who select an alternative lifestyle. That is, the term describes those who consciously reject the lifestyle offered by the corporate state and deliberately engage in activities which involve a different lifestyle—a deliberately chosen alternative. While Rigby’s alienated person is dissatisfied with his own life he is not aware of this feeling within himself and is not therefore ready to do anything about it. I consider two of Rigby’s categories: those alienated and estranged, and those unalienated but utopian (Table 1), closely parallel the two major sub-groups that I identified at The Shop. Consequently, I used Rigby’s theoretical framework to explain these sub-groups I identified at The Shop: those individuals whom I considered alienated by mainstream society because they did not consider it purposeful (whom I termed ‘opt outs’); and those alienated from mainstream society because they had no access to society (whom I termed ‘dropped outs’). This latter group consisted mainly of young people who used The Shop, the great majority of whom were at risk. Rigby’s Type 2 alienated and estranged’ had characteristics of the ‘dropped outs’ and Type 3 unalienated and

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estranged’ had characteristics of the ‘opt outs’ at The Shop. The young people who used The Shop, the dropped outs, typically had left school early, were ongoing truants or refused to attend school and consequently had a limited education. They usually had poor literacy and numeracy skills. They were not overtly concerned about social or political issues. They lacked social skills typical in mainstream society. For example, when they spoke they often used swear words in situations where it was not socially acceptable; and much of their drug use was also public as they would walk around drunk or stoned. The ‘dropped out’ young people at The Shop were typically out of home because they had been kicked out, or had fled home due to conflict or abuse and were consequently further at risk (see Burdekin, 1989). Many were now young offenders. They had not rejected the dominant society, but lacked access to it and acceptance by it. Typically there was no process for them to gain the skills necessary to join mainstream society and so they were barred from it. They were dissatisfied with their situation but did not consider or have any clear ideas or perception of their power to bring about change. Rigby’s type 3 include those individuals who perceive a gap between how society appears to be and how they feel society ought to be: ‘Among their number one can locate the radical activists of society… They seek to create a new social order’ (p. 53). These correspond to the opt outs. For example, Mary established The ‘Shop to create an accepting and caring place for the unemployed. She perceived it as needed particularly because it did not exist in the mainstream system. Joseph, an anarchist, perceived The Shop as an ideal venue in which to develop an alternative to the capitalist system to which he was opposed. Carl was also an anarchist and considered The Shop as important as an alternative option to the mainstream and he supported it as a nut seller and volunteer worker. These individuals deliberately opted out and were consciously trying to create something new and better. While educated and eloquent enough to cope in the capitalist system, they had made a conscious choice not, as far as possible, to be a part of the mainstream system. The ‘opt outs’ were typically tertiary educated and of an older age group (23 plus). This group included the anarchists, the Christians and some of the travellers. They had a choice about whether to be in or out of the dominant economic system because of their education and skills. I recognize Rigby’s categories as ‘types’ and consider it is possible to analyze the motivation of individuals at The Shop in terms of these types. However, my research indicated the dynamic character of humans as there was a process where some people moved or were moving from the dropped out to the opt out group. For example, Peter fled home at 14 because of abuse, and left school at the same time. Working with Joseph at The Shop he had learnt sufficient skills and confidence to gain access to the mainstream and after The Shop obtained an office job. Although the distinction about different motivations for people joining alternative realities has been made (Cock, 1979; Black, 1984; and Metcalfe, 1986), the emphasis about the social causes for these motivations has not to my knowledge been made. Group Cohesion The varied backgrounds of The Shop members gave them a significant commonality. This was their perceived difference to the norm in mainstream society. One of the major and most obvious things about The Shop was how it became a place to which people who were not in mainstream society were attracted and where they felt at home. It became their place where they socialized and worked

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together. Selling, packing and labelling the goods gave all the members a sense of belonging and contributing. All the members could attend meetings and have a say in how things were run. Such participation was one of a number of factors which bonded the people as a group and gave them a sense of mutual dependence, personal support and trust. Cohesion was also promoted due to the fact that most of them broke the law in one way or another and this was accepted. For example the smoking of marijuana was an established norm for almost all the members and in certain subgroups, such as the young people out of home, it was almost expected. It was an activity that people shared, and enjoyed, together. One of the anarchists was an ex-heroin addict and had used most drugs. He was therefore looked up to by some of the younger people who were establishing a connection and identity with the ‘street kids’ and out of home group for whom drug use was an important aspect of their sub-group’s membership and their identity. Peter started to use drugs at this time as did many other young people involved at The Shop. Drug taking was accepted, acceptable and a sign of belonging. Another member, Singer, wrote to me his reflections on drug taking: In terms of socialization [at The Shop] the use of drugs barriers… A parallel could be made with the Red Indian century America. The [Shop] had a sense of community indulgence in marijuana could well be described as a handshake’ for new arrivals.

did aid in breaking down social ‘peace pipe’ ritual of nineteenthfrom the outset. The communal ‘welcome’ mat, or a ‘surrogate

Somewhat less eloquently, Tony, when visiting The Shop stoned, indicated the acceptance of people who used drugs: ‘When you’re stoned there’s nothing better than visiting here’. Peter and Nik confirmed the availability of marijuana when they told me in separate conversations, ‘You could always score at The Shop’. Graffiting was another cohesive device. The anarchists would go out putting up posters and graffiting political and environmental slogans on walls around the city. (When one of their members was jailed even the outside wall of the jail was daubed in a risky sortie.) Occasionally ‘prestigious’ objects and symbols of established values such as the War Memorial were daubed with anti-war messages. The young people wrote their graffiti on trains and in other public places. Some times the young people would join the anarchists on their excursions as this was exciting and there were stories of graffiting while stoned. Graffiti writing was also accepted in The Shop and both major sub-groups engaged in this. Graffiti writing was accepted as a legitimate, although sometimes illegal, activity that the anarchists and the young people got up to. In fact many of the activities that held the group together were illegal and the acceptance of antiauthoritarian activities at The Shop united the members. This was linked to a deeply held dislike of the police who were perceived as tools of a repressive state system. The young people and anarchists saw the police as a harsh and sometimes brutal group who could beat them up with immunity and were instrumental in the taking away of their liberty. The Shop members, united in their view of the police, had a great sense of mutual protection and loyalty. For example when the police called at The Shop, time was played for so the illegal immigrant could escape over the back fence, or drugs could be stashed, or suspect graffitists escape. Young people who had stolen cars or who had warrants out for their arrest were similarly protected. There was a perceived and practised duty in

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mutual protection. The anti-authoritarian behaviour and consequent law breaking gave the members of The Shop a shared identity. As a food supplier, The Shop was also subject to frequent visits by the health inspector of the local council. He frequently gave the members tasks to be done under threat of closure. This also united the members in their animosity to the authority and in ‘busy-bees’ where they worked together to get things done before the health inspector returned. While these factors united the members there were some tensions. This is understandable in that the members were a disparate group of people. At times the differences resulted in conflict. Group Conflict The graffiti in The Shop, while on one level a cohesive device, were also a latent indicator of conflict (O’Dowd, 1986), in this case between the two major sub-groups at The Shop, the opt outs and the dropped outs. However, as Simmel (1955:17–18) notes, ‘A certain amount of discord, inner divergence and outer controversy, is organically tied up with the very elements that ultimately hold the group together…’. So while Nik described one of the Christians as: ‘Some fucking crusading Christian She was such a sleazy back-stabbing arsehole. A fucking pain in the arse. She was from some woop-woop town. She never experienced drug addicts, alcoholics—people like us’, the statement highlights the sense of difference but is also cohesive in that it established her ‘sameness’ to her significant others, her sub-group in The Shop. Interestingly, some of the very things that united the members became a source of conflict when they went beyond what was considered an acceptable limit, which was when the action interfered in the running of The Shop. For example while drug taking was cohesive it became a source of tension as The Shop slid more into debt because it became necessary that people work harder. In this situation the differences in patterns of drug taking amongst the members became apparent. The opt outs took drugs to a much more limited extent than the dropped outs, and drug taking was seen by them as a recreation secondary to their work. The dropped out would typically get drunk, stoned (on marijuana) or take pills (legally prescribed or purchased illegally on the black market) whenever the opportunity arose. This resulted in a level of unreliability; for example, sometimes The Shop was opened late, or people would not turn up for nut rounds, or not turn up to do work when they were depended on. As nut sellers, I and others experienced the annoyance and frustration of turning up to The Shop to do a round only to find it closed because someone had had a hard night. Another significant tension in The Shop arose whenever money was stolen from the till. As there was almost no customer trading in The Shop, outsiders could not be blamed so a regular user and/ or his friend was therefore responsible. Inevitably, after weeks of suspicion, the thefts would stop when a particular person, almost always a friend of a dropped out, left. While the thefts went on there was a great deal of unease because of the suspicion caused and no one would accept that their friends were to blame. Simon and Dave were members of the dropped out group who had limited access to mainstream society. They were regular visitors to The Shop and worked there on occasions. Simon told me he saw people ripping off money but said he didn’t say anything as it wasn’t his responsibility. Dave told me the people who ripped The Shop were friends of the others who came. He said the stolen money was usually used to buy alcohol or marijuana which they and their friends shared. The young people in practice apparently had no desire to reprimand their

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friends as they benefited indirectly through sharing in the alcohol or marijuana which was a more immediate priority than The Shop’s profits. These persistent thefts were an increasing source of tension and conflict at The Shop when sales began to decline. The two main sub-groups involved in The Shop were, then, united by their difference to the outside, mainstream society as the major threat to The Shop’s survival was from outsiders (such as the health department) and this provided an internal cohesion. However, this was not sufficient to unite them in their alternative reality. There was not a unity in purpose in their motivations for being members. They did not all share a commitment to The Shop’s primary role as a political/business enterprise and an alternative reality. The tensions and conflict between those who used The Shop primarily to meet their friends and those for whom it was a social alternative came more to the fore when The Shop as an entity began to sink into serious debt. The increasing debt was a consequence of several factors. Firstly there was a decrease in customer demand as the exotic nuts and dried fruits that The Shop sold started to become widely available in supermarkets. Secondly, other outlets were taking on the marketing style of The Shop and also selling things in offices, Finally, the business skills of those dropped outs now in charge of ordering were more limited and this resulted in good selling lines not being available so sales slumped even further. As the debt grew worse conflict increased. People aligned themselves much more rigidly with their friendship group: opt outs and dropped outs. The difference between the opt and dropped outs came dramatically to the fore. The Shop became a centre of conflict. Dropping in no longer became pleasant; so there were fewer and fewer people to pack and label the goods and so there were fewer items for the sellers to sell. The cooperative became harder work and eventually failed. Analysis of the Cooperative’s Failure The decision makers in the co-op, those with power, were the opt outs. They had not seen that the aims of the dropped outs were not the same as theirs. The opt outs had a vision, belief and commitment in an alternative lifestyle that provided them with greater control and autonomy than the dominant society provided. They had assumed that because people were not in the dominant economic system they did not want to be of the system. This was not the case. Most of the young people wanted the benefits of the capitalist system: good cars and clothes. Although most of the young people liked The Shop because it was an accepting environment, they had no overt vision of a new social order nor did they acquire this while there. So they were not committed to working towards a ‘better’ society. There were therefore very different reasons why people were involved. My analysis of the cooperative led me to conclude that it failed because of the financial drain on The Shop by those who had no choice about access to society, in particular the young people who were out of home. For an alternative reality to work I concluded that there needed to be much more work on educating the members in the philosophy and practice of cooperatives. The young people were not interested in cooperatives because they did not know enough of the principles. I concluded that those at risk would not automatically be interested in alternative realities because they were educated informally, through advertising and the consumer orientated materialistic ideology of the current society, in the benefits of the capitalist system and had not been educated in practice in the alternative. For the at risk to gain access to the mainstream greater points of access needed to be created.

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Part 2: The Shop’s Former Members Revisited Five years later, in 1990, I recommenced research into the at risk. As a part of this I returned to reinterview The Shop’s ex-members. I was particularly interested in the perspective of the dropped out about the good and ‘empowering’ aspects of the cooperative as well as their criticisms of it, so that I could develop a theory of empowerment of young people at risk and make use of their reflections and conclusions. I was attempting to work within an empowering research methodology (Lather, 1988) and to avoid research that ‘is frequently conducted in a rape model: the researchers take, hit and run’ (Reinhartz, 1979:95). I attempted to involve the subjects and feed back to them what the data was indicating. I hoped the research thus would be more empowering and more ethical. Feminists have attempted to develop alternative research styles that consider an ethical dimension (for example see Bowles and DuelliKlein, 1983), but it is a difficult issue. Stanley and Wise (1983: 166) note how attempting empathy can result in ‘“fictitious sympathy” [which] differs from “real sympathy” and is defective because it isn’t based upon sharing the same important emotions; the only way to share emotions is to share experiences’. I considered and attempted to practise reciprocity, a sharing of information, in the research process. 1990: Conclusions from Research about Empowerment of the At Risk My initial data was collected between 1985 and 1987 when the cooperative closed due to debt. Many of the young people from The Shop were unemployed when I returned in 1990, but most had found rented accommodation, one was living in a squat and another was homeless. Many were now members of an underclass of un-and under-employed. In my interviews in 1990 I asked the young people what they thought would be appropriate support for those who found themselves in the situation they had been in. Their responses reflected their experiences. All the young people thought there needed to be another The Shop or ‘safe place’ to go where there was similar emotional and social support. It had to be a place where they were accepted and felt they belonged. However many of the young people felt there was a need to encourage people to access employment and relevant training. They saw this as an unmet need at The Shop. Others reflected that in ‘another shop’ people needed to see the applicability of what they were doing to the work force. Nik stated that they needed to be able to say, ‘I was a shop assistant, a storeperson…’, to ground the experience they had gained. While recreation was also seen as a need, the young people did not see it as a replacement for what they wanted, work. Nik argued, ‘You can’t tell an employer you’ve got a certificate in abseiling, he doesn’t care’. This strongly indicates that it is not enough simply to occupy young people’s time; they want to be linked to something that is meaningful to them in terms of employment opportunities in the mainstream. Many young people stated that they considered The Shop experience was positive. They identified the lack of pressure, the lack of structure and the acceptance that they received at The Shop as an important, and major part of its attraction. However, because it was so accepting, they noted that it was easy and acceptable to be unmotivated and to do nothing. The Shop’s opt outs had not motivated the young people on an ongoing basis and this was suggested as necessary and important. The ‘time out’ provided by drugs was seen as positive and necessary at times when the young people had found it hard to cope because life appeared so desolate and painful. The personal histories of these young people were typically painful and damaging. Dusty suggested that his past

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affected his ‘nuts and bolts’. Unlike most of the others, Dusty had received a lot of trained counselling since The Shop days and he regarded this counselling as vital in his coming to terms with his personal experiences. However, many of the young people recognized the informal counselling that they had received at The Shop from the opt outs as important because it had enabled them to make sense of their history and to see how that past was impacting on their present behaviour. The concept of ‘healing’ (that is the young people gaining an understanding of the impact of their past on their behaviour and coming to terms with that past, so it did not control their lives) appears relevant to empowerment. Tim, Simon and Peter said they had received a lot of informal counselling from Joseph and they identified this as important. For example, Peter shared with Joseph a traumatic experience that had been instrumental in his leaving home. He had got significant emotional and social support and informal counselling. Nik reflected that she had talked a lot to Mary about her past, and since The Shop had spent a lot of time alone which she had found valuable in helping her to reflect on her past and look to the future. It is interesting that most of the young people who had received informal counselling said they would never have gone to professional agencies. They had obtained advice because the people were their friends. I looked at some of the young people who had been at risk and who were now working. Peter had joined the Public Service after the co-op and could therefore be seen as a success because he had accessed mainstream society and had, as socially defined, a good job. This appeared linked to both the counselling and the skills and knowledge he had acquired through working with Joseph. Tim, who had been linked to store work while at The Shop, had obtained employment. He also had a close relationship with Joseph and got important support from him and Mary. However, both these young men had mothers who were professional nurses and therefore successful and ‘appropriate’ role models from the mainstream system. For example they owned their own homes. Perhaps, more significantly, their mothers were described positively by these young men. A positive relationship with a caring adult was identified by Werner (1989) as one of the factors identified in children from at risk backgrounds who were ‘resilient’ (they were no longer at risk). In this research a positive relationship with an adult caregiver as a child appeared to assist young people in being able to develop trust relationships in their adult life. Consequently, the early socialization, and the values and norms the young men were exposed to were much more akin to mainstream society than many of the other young people who were mainly from broken families where the parenting had been erratic. These young people remained unemployed after the close of The Shop. They did not have such close relationships with the opt outs at The Shop. It appeared that because they lacked close relationships with people whom they could trust, and whose values they could identify with, they found it much harder to integrate, or to see value in attempting to join the mainstream. The young people who were poorly educated, from lower socio-economic backgrounds and abusive families were also fairly inarticulate in terms of the idiom of the dominant society and did not have the skills or knowledge to market what they had done at The Shop to potential employers. Yet the more ‘traditionally articulate’ young people who knew, and cared about, how and when not to swear, and more readily learned how to market their experiences at The Shop had a more mainstream economic upbringing. It appears while they had rejected their parents (and/or been rejected by them) because of abuse or neglect, they had absorbed the mainstream (material) value system of their parents. In addition, their earlier socialization with appropriate parenting, appeared

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to have provided them with greater ability to form trust relationships at The Shop and thus through this to be in a position to acquire the skills to access the mainstream system. It appears that Bourdieu and Passeron’s (1977) idea of cultural capital could be combined with an idea of ‘psychological’ capital, and that this could explain why certain young people, who were seemingly equally disadvantaged by being out of home, accessed, or were empowered to access, the mainstream system. These young people had, in childhood, experienced mainstream values (not necessarily middle-class norms) and possibly conceptualized or internalized or perceived the social world differently to the others, because they saw the mainstream as important and accessible. Young people without this background were members of an underclass of long term unemployed, who had fairly transient accommodation and a continuing criminal record for petty offences. They still lacked access. I concluded that a strategy of empowerment with the at risk required firstly a place where they felt safe, accepted and a sense of belonging (this implies some sense of ownership so that they feel their friends are welcome). The study indicated that young people required social and emotional support, and counselling. The young people felt the counselling should take place in the context of ‘natural’ relationships (not worker-client), where the young people knew, accepted and trusted those they talked to. The young people wanted the power to choose if they wanted to talk about their problems. Consequently informal counselling, in a non-structured context, was the form the young people considered appropriate and necessary. The young people felt that the passing on of information, skills and training should take place in a supportive environment where they were encouraged and motivated and where they could see clear links to the mainstream system. The place should not be highly pressured and it was important that there should be provision for ‘time out’. In the context of the young peoples’ backgrounds of abuse and rejection these requirements could be easily understood as providing for needs and opportunities that they had missed out on. It appeared that young people who had experienced very little trust and love needed greater opportunities in which to develop positive relationships, as they needed more time and understanding and/or skilled intervention to acquire the ‘psychological’ capital which was necessary to develop such relationships. The young people brought up in families or environments where their significant caregivers were members of an underclass appeared more at risk of remaining outside the mainstream system and this appeared to be associated with their early socialization (social class experiences). If, in addition, the young people came from a background where they did not have positive relationships/appropriate parenting with a caring adult, their ‘at riskness’ increased because they did not have the same level of skills as other young people in developing positive relationships which assist people in gaining access to the mainstream system. So while Schwendinger et al. (1976) noted that middle-class, but marginalized, young people had more ‘absorption mechanisms’, such as access to counselling, in this study it appears that access is not enough for young people from backgrounds where they had not been socialized with mainstream values in their immediate environment. Such young people may require more intensive work to empower them in the practice, as well as the knowledge, that access to the mainstream is possible. So access to ‘aborption mechanisms’, such as counselling, is not enough and an empowerment process needs to recognize not only structural issues of access, but process issues which embrace a recognition of the interplay between social and psychological issues.

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While I was researching empowerment in 1990 I spent a lot of time with the young people. The methodology meant there was much more of an exchange of views than in my earlier research with them. It was in this exchange with its non-directive style of interviewing that I became dissatisfied with my earlier data interpretation and conclusions (outlined above) that did not appear to address all the issues. Part 3: Reflexivity—Research Re-visioned In the remainder of this chapter I attempt to locate the research, and myself the researcher, in a theoretical framework. I endeavour to show how my description of the cooperative and its members was not a neutral reality but was a compilation of factors that shaped my seeing: the constructs, ideas and experience that I brought to the research experience. I reflect on the data and my analysis. My research perspective in part three is influenced by systems theory of the second generation (Rittel, 1982), and post-positivist philosophy (which embraces postmodernism and poststructuralism). I also use feminist theory in this tradition. I draw conclusions about the implications of the findings to empowerment. Reflexive Research 1990 After I had written up the findings I began to reflect on my earlier analysis of the data in part one and the data collected in 1990 more carefully. I looked at what the young people told me in addition to what I had wanted to learn, I was no longer satisfied with my original data interpretation. I felt I had failed to describe the reality of the young people at risk, most of whom were now members of an underclass. I used a reflexive methodology which means ‘…in simple terms, to…probe beyond the level of “straightforward” interpretation…’ (Woolgar, 1988:16). It involves looking again: revisioning and deconstructing the text and the author, to consider alternative interpretations of the ethnographic record. Reflexive research raises issues where ‘… the observer, the agent of representation, has become again part of the picture’ (Woolgar, 1988:16). I began to see how my earlier interpretation was a product of my social constructs—what I could see and how I saw it—a factor I had not considered in 1986/7. I began to consider that certain feminist ideas about patriarchal power were relevant to the position I had taken as a researcher and that these ideas were relevant to researchers in general: male or female. I developed the idea that as a researcher I had operated in a framework of positivism, certainty and absolutes which is a part of the patriarchal tradition of hegemony, hierarchy and dominance. In this tradition the researcher names: what is normal, what is true, what exists. I reflected on how I came to see the subjects of my research as an underclass of at risk people that I oppressed as a researcher. My re-visioning was very much influenced by new ‘knowledge’ including a post-positivist and systems perspective on the world, but was interconnected with the experience that I had obtained with at risk young people in the intervening years. I will briefly outline this perspective and then relate it to my research.

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A Post-positivist and Systems Perspective Postmodern epistemology is ‘…questioning the basis of truths…’ (Mascia-Lees et al., 1989:15) and assumes that reality is interpreted through the constructs that the observer brings to any situation. These constructs are shaped by the class, culture and experience of the researcher. The written texts are thus seen as inseparable from how the author views the world: a world where there is no certainty: Postmodern discourses are all ‘deconstructive’ in that they seek to distance us from and make us skeptical about beliefs concerning truth, knowledge, power, the self, and language that are often taken for granted within and serve as legitimation for contemporary western culture (Flax, 1987:624). In this tradition ethnographic research is considered to reflect not ‘the’ account of reality but the author’s description of ‘a’ reality which the writer describes—we describe things the way they are and the way they are becomes the way we describe it (von Foerster: 1986). So a text is no longer seen as impartial but as a perception of what is true. The postmodern epistemological view is common in some systems theory and has antecedents in feminist theory: …what appear to be new and exciting insights to these postmodernist anthropologists—that culture is composed of seriously contested codes of meaning, that language and politics are inseparable, and that constructing the ‘other’ entails relations of domination—are insights that have received repeated and rich exploration in feminist theory for the past forty years (MasciaLees et al, 1989:11). Systems theory of the second generation is very different from that of the first generation with its conservative application by writers such as Talcott Parsons and as criticized in Lilienfeld (1982/88: 166–72). The later systems theory is used as a way to attempt to look at the interconnections between disciplines and, indeed, all forms of life. It can be used as a way of viewing the world and/ or the connections between various parts within the whole (Capra, 1982). It has been used by deep ecologists such as Naess (1989) to look at the interrelatedness of all life. Von Bertalanffy (1975:149) refers to ‘Aristotle’s “the whole is more than the sum of its parts” as a definition of the basic system problem that is still valid’. Briefly, systems theory construes the world from a dialectical perspective with all the organisms, including humans, and the entire ecosystem interacting and interconnected in a web of complex relationships. The ontological perspective of systems theorists such as Maturana and Varela (1987) is common to post-positivism and contends that there is no objective reality and that a reality, as described, is a construction of the observer: ‘We do not presuppose an objective world independent of us as observers…’ (p. 241). So knowledge is seen, not as an objective fact, but as a reflection of the perceptions and understandings that the observer brings to the situation which may or may not be true. Consequently we can never know something is a fact and true; we can only believe it to be so. This connects with ideas in post-positivist philosophy. Wittgenstein (1972:2e) states: ‘From its seeming to me—or to everyone—to be so, it doesn’t follow that it is so’. Therefore what was once construed as a ‘certainty’ becomes a possible or contingent certainty because it has arisen out of a

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particular framework of perceptions and beliefs. In short, ‘The truth of certain empirical propositions belongs to our frame of reference’ (Wittgenstein, 1972:12e). So that what we can ‘see’ and perceive is a factor of the frameworks (recognized or unrecognized) that we bring to the situation. Berger (1974:8) notes: The way we see things is affected by what we know or what we believe. In the Middle Ages when men believed in the physical existence of Hell the sight of fire must have meant something different from what it means today. The implications of this perspective in philosophy and systems theory is that we cannot know anything with absolute certainty and therefore all knowledge claims must be treated with caution: The knowledge of knowledge compels. It compels us to adopt an attitude of permanent vigilance against the temptation of certainty. It compels us to recognise that certainty is not proof of truth. It compels us to realise that the world everyone sees is not the world but a world which we bring forth with others (Maturana and Varela, 1987:245). Neither systems theory nor this chapter sets out to answer philosophical questions, to investigate philosophical debates, or the traditions that underlie them, but acknowledges this philosophy as a base for looking at the world, and a basis for revisioning the text. Using this perspective the observer has the capacity to ‘see again’, to reconstruct, the same ‘reality’ when they recognize and reflect on how their framework shaped their perceptions: We do not see what we do not see, and what we do not see does not exist. Only when some interaction dislodges us—such as being suddenly relocated to a different cultural environment —and we reflect upon it, do we bring forth new constellations of relation that we explain by saying that we were not aware of them, or that we took them for granted (Maturana and Varela, 1987:242). Feminist theorists have used such ideas to deconstruct and reconstruct ‘woman’. For example Rich suggest the need for women to re-vision their past in order to understand how they have been shaped by it: Re-vision—the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction… Until we understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves. And this drive to self knowledge…is more than a search for identity: it is a part of our refusal of the self destructiveness of a male dominated3 society. A radical critique of literature, feminist in its impulse, would take the work first of all as a clue to how we live, how we have been living, how we have been led to imagine ourselves, our language has trapped as well as liberated us, how the very act of naming has been until now a male prerogative (Rich, 1979:35). Applying such a perspective involves seeing ourselves as drenched in assumptions and constructs which arise out of our social experience and affect the perceptions through which our knowledge

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arises and alters. Deconstructing these assumptions helps us in our understanding because there are no neutral interpretations but they arise from a belief. ‘The child learns by believing the adult. Doubt comes after belief (Wittgenstein, 1972:23e). We need to be aware of our framework which is based on beliefs and assumptions because without this awareness we cannot doubt. It is from this process of reflection or ‘…what Habermas calls the “self-reflection”, or “reflexivity” of human agents…’ (Giddens, 1985:18), that we acquire the ability to see how perceptions of certainty arise. The process of questioning the constructs with which we ‘saw’ develops into deconstruction, where ‘reality’ can be, not only questioned, but reconstructed. Thus instead of a reality, ‘realities’ may emerge. Feminist theorists have used deconstruction to consider how society and patriarchy constructed ‘woman’ as other to man. The discussion of the female as “other” was the starting point of contemporary feminist theory’ (Mascia-Lees et al., 1989:11). I attempt to reconstruct The Shop and how I saw the at risk as an ‘other’ to myself. Reconstructing The Shop’s Realities I began to deconstruct the reality of the co-op, and the subjects that I had constructed, and to reconstruct another reality. Neither of the realities was wrong or right. I realized that two very important factors shaped my initial analysis: (1) how I framed/constructed whom I was interpreting and (2) how I framed/constructed what I was interpreting. I will firstly look at whom I saw using de Beauvoir’s (1949/81) idea of ‘other’. Patriarchal Thinking, the ‘Other’ and the Researcher I use reflexivity here in the context of an analysis of the idea of ‘otherness’ because I think it is a valuable concept to use in social analysis with reference to the traditional perception of the researcher and scientist as objective and impartial observers of reality. I use this construct of ‘otherness’ and ‘other’ to argue that the tradition of patriarchy operates in the research process under an illusion of objectivity and that this can be oppressive. De Beauvoir writes, ‘Otherness is a fundamental category of human thought. Thus it is that no group ever sets itself up as the One without at once setting up the Other over against itself (1981: 17). In her analysis of the subjugated role of women she argues that woman is defined in relation to man and therefore ‘man’ is perceived as neutral. Consequently, by the very process of definition, woman is other, and inferior, as man is construed as the norm. …it is understood that the fact of being a man is no peculiarity. A man is in the right in being a man; it is the woman who is wrong. It amounts to this: just as for the ancients there was an absolute vertical with reference to which the oblique was defined, so there was an absolute human type, the masculine (p. 15). De Beauvoir argues that there is a social assumption that man’s thinking is inherently superior to a woman’s. It was this biological gender based assumption that man’s thinking was superior that de Beauvoir challenged. De Beauvoir’s argument was that a women’s assumed inferiority rested in her

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position as ‘other to’ man, the norm. De Beauvoir described a mode of thinking which was dominant, and oppressive to women, that was a part of a male patriarchial perspective. She took one conceptual and profound step: she has identified a paradigm that describes constructs of superiority in male thinking and used it to reinterpret women’s reality. With the constructs underlying male thinking exposed they are then open to question. I find the notion of patriarchy very important and a useful way of thinking about types of thinking (metathinking). Therefore I use the idea of patriarchal thinking (exclusive of a gender concept) in my analysis. I will illustrate the importance of distinguishing patriarchal from male by using de Beauvoir’s reply to a man who assumed his male thinking as superior. She replied,’ “I think thus because it is true,” thereby removing my subjective self from the argument’ (p. 15). She appealed to truth as a neutral arbitrator. In doing this de Beauvoir did two things. She assumed a position of inferiority because she did not claim female thinking (female) to be as valid, or the same, as man’s. Secondly, she has not removed the subjective self, as she states, but failed to recognize the subjectiveness of her own truth. What de Beauvoir did is interesting. She placed her thinking on a higher level to man’s, terming her words as truth. But by stating her thinking was true, she adopted the man’s paradigm of dominance and patriarchal thinking by assuming not only superiority but truth. That patriarchal thinking and behaviour is not the prerogative of the male gender is suggested in Kohler Reissman (1987), Tronto (1987) and Derrida (1987) who in commenting on structures as a part of male institutions spoke of ‘the masculine directors of the university—masculine, whether women or not…’ (p. 191). Fox Keller notes that feminists are examining patriarchal bias ‘on ever deeper levels of social structure, even of language and thought’ (Fox Keller in Harding, 1987:236). De Beauvoir’s response to hegemony was (p. 15) an appeal to truth and in this instance she became a part of the ‘male paradigm’ of certainty, hegemony and supposed objectivity. Patriarchy is not an uncommon mode of thinking. The perception of men as superior, as de Beauvoir points out, was vested in the supposed neutrality of maleness. But this position is in fact one of assumed superiority as it enables the ‘neutral’ man to assume the position of being able ‘impartially’ to comment on, to evaluate and to judge the other—in this case woman. The research and scientific traditions that consider the researcher’s data collection and analysis as an objective description of reality are, I would argue, a part of the patriarchal paradigm. The notion of a researcher as objective observer comes from this tradition of patriarchy. The researcher’s findings are seen to constitute neutral facts and knowledge; like de Beauvoir, the researcher describes reality that way ‘because it is true’. The subjects in research may become the other and the researcher’s interpretations can be the products of their own hegemony. De Beauvoir states, ‘if…we admit, provisionally, that women do exist, then we must face the question: what is a woman?’ (1981:15). Similarly, if we as researchers admit that we and subjects exist, then we must, I would argue, ask: What is the researcher? What is the subject? How is the researcher interpreting the world? What is the relationship between the two? The researcher must attempt to be aware of how her framework, which has a philosophical base, affects what she sees. As Wittengenstein states, ‘Working in philosophy…is really more a working on oneself. On one’s own interpretation. On one’s way of seeing things’ (1980:16e).

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The Other My initial data analysis ‘discovered’ that the people whom I termed the dropped outs were instrumental in the failure of a worker cooperative. At the end of the first research period, in 1987, I had explored and understood why this alternative reality ‘failed’. I had understood that those who had been dropped out of society had been a drain. They had behaviours that had to be altered—they needed education in the principles of cooperation. I saw them as ‘others’. I knew that they acted and behaved differently to me. I saw them as different. I saw them as oppressed. I saw them in Buber’s terms as in as I-It relationship, and not an I-Thou (Buber, 1970). I had seen more of their flaws than their potential. I had seen the subjects as other to myself and I had described their reality from my position: my hegemony, my constructs. My perceived research object was of a cooperative, an alternative reality, that was providing something positive for people who lacked access to society, the dropped outs. I had not seen the anarchists or the Christians or most of the travellers as different to myself. I shared their constructs about the capitalist world. I too was looking for an alternative and it ‘made sense’ to open the alternative to more disadvantaged others who would, as victims of the dominant hegemony, be thought of as viewing the dominant system in the same way. I had been careful not to form closer relationships with the opt outs than with the dropped outs as I realized they would be the group I would have more empathy with. However, while I had considered how my cultural capital (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1977) would influence whom I would form relationships with, I had not considered how my thinking, my constructs, would cause me to see a particular reality and to favour some ideas, interpretations and values over others. I had not understood how my life and experience had tied me to the opt out group so even without directly establishing closer relationships with them, in terms of ideals and world view I was closer to them. I was something of an opt out. I understood their cause. I was sympathetic to their motivations. I had not understood the dropped outs beyond that categorization, because my intellectual and social cultural capital and constructs did not see that their reality was valid. I did not know their reality, nor how they viewed the world. I saw them as different to me but I did not assume the need to view their ‘reality’, as for me there was only one reality, the one I saw. In retrospect I saw that, as I was interested in the cooperative as a ‘new’ order, my constructs and judgments about those who were not acting as I perceived members of the new order should behave were influenced and constructed by this perception. The dropped outs for me were the drug taking other. I was not therefore a neutral observer but a person operating within The Shop’s dominant hegemony. 1990: De-constructing the ‘Other’ After re-meeting and re-interviewing the former co-op members, I considered that I had made a leap that somehow denied the humanity of these at risk young people. It was inadequate to consider the dropped outs as people who were a drain on The Shop, they were something beyond an oppressed minority that I labelled. I had viewed them through a construct as oppressed, as other to myself and the opt outs. I now believe I had not the skills or the experience to relate to and understand the importance of observing and listening to the reality of the young at risk people in The Shop. In 1990 I believe I managed this better and I consider this was a result of experiences that enabled me to ‘see’. As stated, in the intervening years I had worked two years in a situation where I was for most of the time a lone worker running a youth centre targeting the at risk. Drug use and heavy drinking

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by these young people was not uncommon and neither was violence. In this environment the rules were formed and enforced cooperatively, within the constraints of the law, and were balanced in terms of their norms. I had to learn these norms. I also learnt a lot about their backgrounds not as abstract life histories but as painful psychological injuries that they shared as our relationship developed. I got to know the young people in an environment where their norms and needs were important and where I was dependent on them in situations of violence and conflict. I was exposed to their vulnerability when they related traumatic life histories that they found confusing and painful. I learned that they expressed their pain in suicide, self mutilation, drug taking, and anger. I learnt a lot more about drug taking. I also learned to appreciate the young people for their happiness, zest, energy, sense of humour, their challenges and cooperation. It was at times traumatic but also very enjoyable. In this period I saw patterns between the young people’s background experiences and their socially unacceptable ways. Their actions became ‘normal’, understandable reactions, in the context of their backgrounds. When I came back to re-interview the at risk from The Shop they were much less ‘other to’ me. I had an understanding of how they thought and why they behaved in the ways they did. In addition we now had a shared history that we looked back on together. Nik said to me, ‘You were part of the place’. I will now look at how my construct of what I saw framed my seeing. Reconstructing The Shop In this section I look at how I framed/constructed what I was interpreting and then go on to reconstruct another reality in The Shop. I concluded in 1987 that the cooperative was failing and ultimately failed because it was being used by a sub-group of members who were more a drain on, than an input into, this alternative reality and that therefore ‘alternative realities’ were not an appropriate option for the at risk. These conclusions were, in retrospect, accurate for that situation, but I had not been aware of how my analysis was limited by the context or system in which I had seen, or had not seen, the at risk. I interpreted a reality, the cooperative. I had not recognized that those at risk had no power to name a reality suitable to their needs, but their use of the ‘co-op’ defined their needs and its function for them. They did not name it in words but they ‘named’ it differently in their practice. The construction of The Shop as a cooperative was not a neutral way of perceiving and interpreting reality. It led me to look at not simply the at risk, but to look at them in the context of and ‘as members of that particular reality. I drew conclusions about them in the context of a political and social situation which they had not constructed. The reality in which they operated was not neutral, but was a defined entity, like society, in which they had little chance of gaining power. I had analyzed The Shop through particular constructs, that of a worker cooperative and alternative reality. These reflected my interests and influenced what I saw. When the people all spoke of The Shop as a worker cooperative, I had assumed this as the reality. I had constructed my analysis of The Shop on how it was presented to me, its real or manifest function. That function was described by those who had established The Shop. They were eloquent and interested in The Shop (their construction). The others, the dropped out, described it in the same terms: a cooperative. I researched the coop and those involved in it with reference to that reality. However,

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those who named The Shop, and its role and functions, were those in power, the anarchists and Christians, the opt outs. They described the reality they had constructed. In the capacity of the right to name, power existed on a very fundamental non-overt and non-manifest level. The power of the name ‘cooperative’ was crucial in how I initially analyzed The Shop. For the at risk The Shop was firstly a place where they could drop in, be accepted and have a cup of coffee. It happened to be a worker cooperative, and thus they called it by what it had been named, but they had not done the naming. The way the at risk used The Shop was not as it was named. They defined its reality by their practice. They defined it in a different way. When I contacted Ted, a young Nyoongah man, in 1990, he said, ‘Yeh, I remember [The Shop] and The Den’. I was surprised by this association. The Den was the name of an inner city drop-in centre that provided a place for people to go, pool, free tea and coffee. Although many of the young people and one adult from The Shop were involved in both ventures, they seemed like very different places to me. However, both places had essentially the same function from the young people’s point of view, somewhere to drop in, where they and their friends were accepted. The at risk got involved in The Shop as it was relevant and accessible to them. The cooperative aspect was not the main function for the young people. Cooperation was good but not why they went there. This came up again and again in the conversations in 1990 before I heard it as relevant. I had accepted the dominant group’s view (who were the dominant hegemony in this case) without even considering that there could have been another reality which existed because of other needs and also because of opportunity. I then reflected on one aspect of the ‘others’ behaviour, the drug taking of the dropped outs. I applied a systems analysis in considering how the part (the drug taking) was related to the whole (the life and lifestyle of these people). There were different realities operating and thus different expectations and outcomes for those involved which were to some extent in conflict. Thus conflict amongst The Shop’s participants was inevitable. In retrospect it would be valuable for the researcher, me, to attempt to recognize how she, I, construct(s) reality, and to investigate how others use a supposed reality, to see how they construct it. It is not enough to see how a place is named, because naming is a prerogative of those in power. It is important to deconstruct how reality is named and how actions reflect an unspoken name, or un-naming. It is therefore important not to assume the reality. So while The Shop on one level was named a worker cooperative, this was not the construct that shaped how people used and treated it, nor was it a consistent perception. The worker cooperative I saw reflected what I was interested in and it limited not only what I saw but how I saw it. The conclusions were not only arrived at by looking at the cooperative but also in the way I perceived and constructed the at risk. I will now attempt to use a systems perspective to see the interconnectedness of participants’ drug taking and their lifestyle and human needs. A Systems Perspective on Drug Use In 1990, when I reinterviewed the members of The Shop, one of my initial interests was whether those who had been using drugs frequently were still doing so, and secondly whether they were now employed. I had not been aware of a more holistic perspective, but saw factors such as drug taking in isolation from the system in which it took place.

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Frequently when I re-interviewed the young people from The Shop a joint was rolled or a bong lit during the interview. Often the interviews took place in the context of a meal as they came for lunch or dinner to where I was staying. The interviews were informal and the data collection strung out until they decided to leave, sometimes six or more hours later. So they were pretty casual and, while I had certain questions, the sessions were not really designed around the questions as I was trying to get some holistic understanding of their lives. A theme emerged in the 1990 interviews that The Shop was important as a place to earn or steal money for drugs. It began to emerge that in many cases the need for drugs was linked to some trauma the young person had experienced. Again and again the theme kept emerging about the great sensation, the anaesthetizing effect of drugs and pills. For Tim, The Shop was ‘somewhere to go and pass the time… The only time I went out selling was when I wanted drugs’. The desire for drugs was linked to the need for a pain killer, a way out. For Nik, ‘It’s great. To be so drug fucked you just don’t care: pilled out. It’s great feeling, just great… I loved being out of it. It was pleasure. You don’t think. I used to like not having to think. It wasn’t a drama. If you let yourself think it was a drama’. Dusty considered that The Shop helped him earn money for drugs and that the drugs helped him cope with his private pain. He explained, ‘It took me a long time to admit I was sexually abused by my uncle. If you don’t admit it…it affects your nuts and bolts—your brain’. Tim had been ‘glue sniffing at 13’ and smoking ‘pot at 14’. He explained his motivation as: ‘I can’t say why…but I feel relaxed… I was always getting blown out… You feel nothing…a great anaesthetic Another theme in these young persons’ lives was the lack of alternative things to do and places to go. The lack of other things to do was closely associated with the need for a place to meet and talk to other people. They frequently mentioned that The Shop was a ‘safe’ place, which is interesting and perhaps links with their precarious accommodation and family histories of abuse and conflict. As several of the dropped outs put it: ‘Basically I had nothing to do. I kept going back’ (Singer). ‘We loved that place’ (Ted). ‘Somewhere to hang out, safe…have fun…there? because I didn’t have anywhere else to go… To meet and talk about life, the universe and everything’ (Simon). The young people kept telling me how they liked drugs. However, it was a significant period of time before I absorbed/heard the ‘drugs are great’ hypothesis because it was an ‘unacceptable’ hypothesis—unacceptable in that I did not consider this a finding as it was not a ‘solution’ but an endorsement of what I had seen as a ‘problem’. I was now in the concluding stage of my research and I was searching for solutions to tie the data on the co-op together in terms of findings on empowerment. This was the research agenda I had set. It took me ages before I absorbed their views about drugs and initially I only joked about ‘my new hypothesis’ that drug taking was really good. Yet what I was getting was an insight into their social perception of their drug taking reality—which I had not done previously. It was now 1990. These dropped outs were older, and could articulate their experiences as they had reflected on them. I could listen more effectively to hear ‘new’ information. They were less strange others and I was less of an other to them because of our shared past. They were more understandable because of my ‘new’ knowledge of the at risks’ reality that I had learned in the youth centre where I had known closely and sometimes intimately young people from the same backgrounds. At the youth centre I had the cynical reflection at times that drug taking was more my problem than the young people’s. They were apparently enjoying themselves. I was the one troubled by it. Now I was actually exploring

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what drugs (illegal) meant to them as distinct from what they meant to me as a member of mainstream society. Neither reality is wrong; both are valid perceptions. However, to see their reality is very important in terms of actions about my owned belief about ‘excessive’ drug use being destructive of people’s potential and of society’s norms. Nik linked the need for drugs to a response to life’s ‘drama’ which was a source of pain. This is a similar response to the medical model where one of the reasons for prescribing drugs is to alleviate pain.4 Now if drug taking is a response to pain, and the source of the pain is in these young people’s lives, then it must be seen as the source of their initial drug taking. Drug taking could be construed as a normal response when needs are not being met and where that deprivation of needs means that life is too difficult to cope with on a daily basis when not drugged or ‘straight’. The young people’s view of the necessary amount to be prescribed was different to that of doctors. In this context drug taking is an understandable response and a ‘normal’ response given the life experience of the young people. In my initial observations of the young people from The Shop my social constructs about the functions of The Shop influenced the way I looked at drug taking. I accepted the needs of The Shop’s survival over that of the young people’s needs without even being aware that this was a factor of the way I was viewing the reality. I did not know that the young people’s perception of reality was important, or even valid. Even when I re-interviewed them it took a lot of time and reflection for me to ‘hear’ that drugs were used as a great pain killer, and to understand this as valid. I did not see drugs as fulfilling a need, so having a positive function for those using; nor did I develop a hypothesis about the need for free drugs for individuals who were typically from abused backgrounds. Rather, I considered their responses as ‘problems’ and not as valid perceptions to be included in any holistic ‘solution’. The young people’s contentment and need for drugs was construed by me as a sign of their malaise and their ‘difference’. While I saw that drug taking was a norm, I again dichotomized, seeing it as normal for ‘them’ and only relevant as such. I did not consider their drug taking as affirmative action and indicative of their taking some control, but as negative and as inaction. When I reflected on my data I began to see how drug taking for the young people was at first a pleasant experience because it fulfilled immediate needs, but also was a part of a sub-culture where acceptance came if one used drugs. Latterly I began to see the lifestyle that developed around drug taking. I began to see that it was part of a social scene, providing for previously unmet human needs. So in addition to killing pain, or making it duller, drug taking also had other social consequences. It provided excitement because it was illegal. There was drama with police raids and arrests. These raids and arrests created victims who got caught and were the unfortunate targets of a hated ‘other’ to the young people, the police. There was sympathy and empathy for those caught/oppressed. There were heroes who escaped, who had somehow foiled the ‘evil oppressors’, the police. It was a shared tragedy when someone overdosed. Drug taking was a cohesive action that linked the users as a group. There were group traditions in common attitudes and values. For example the police were typically considered as corrupt. There were many stories of their framing people and stealing drugs for their own use. In addition there were legends that grew up as a part of this scene. There were lively and amusing oral stories and histories, which were often embellished in the telling, and from which the orators got kudos. For instance Bouncer talked with great vividness (a story I had heard him recount before) about the time he shared a house with some university students one of whom was a

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friend of his. He said Rob (his friend) had come around to the house with some of his mates from university. He had told them that there was a heroin addict in the house. Rob then went to Bouncer and asked him if he’d shoot up so they could watch. So I said, ‘Oh all right’. So with them all watching I stuck the needle in, gave it a bit of a squirt with blood—just for drama. All these faces hanging around the bedroom door watching. Rob impressing his mates! Another old story that I often heard was one by Joseph. He asked, ‘Have you heard about the friend of mine who got eaten by a polar bear in Perth?’ Almost everyone had but Joseph would always repeat it. It was a true story and amusing and sad for its lunacy. A couple of friends of Joseph’s dropped some acid5 and went tripping in the Perth zoo. One climbed into the polar bear enclave and was mauled to death. Joseph always told it like it was a big joke and everyone usually laughed or groaned at his sense of fun. The death was down played. There was Simon’s story of being busted by the police: a part fact, part fancy tale. In the telling the events all happen in the one day. In practice the arrival of the police came several days later because Simon had a warrant out for him. The story goes: Simon’s house had been robbed and his friend Bouncer lost some things. Simon phoned the police to report the theft. He took a shower while waiting for the police to come. Meantime, some friends called round and while waiting for him they lit up a joint. Simon walks out of the shower just as the police come in while his friends are passing around the joint. So Simon’s friends get busted for dope smoking. The police then search the house, find a marijuana plant, and arrest Simon. Sometimes the stories had morals and lessons for life. For example Simon’s story ends with a court appearance and an $800 fine and the obvious lesson is to stay away from the police. Bouncer’s indicates his friend’s acquaintances’ ‘otherness’ and thereby reinforces minority group solidarity. Joseph’s story suggests the foolish behaviour of one user and by implication their greater sense: they were still alive. Another part of this lifestyle is the need to obtain money to buy drugs. This required ‘necessary’ crime (to provide money for supply). All these aspects added drama to lives where paying the rent and bills were difficulties, where outside recreation was often too expensive, where owning a car was an exception and where there was little hope of work that would bring any status and self esteem. In addition most of those involved had memories of a childhood and adolescence where there was ongoing trauma that resulted in unresolved psychological pain that was good to forget. If we acknowledge a bit of excitement as a human need, particularly given the high energy levels of young people, then the drug and crime culture has a very important latent function, for young people, of providing a more absorbing and interesting lifestyle. One typical/normal consequence of purchasing drugs, which is difficult on unemployment benefits because of the costs, is dealing. For example, Tim (although not unemployed in 1990) tried to fix up some contacts for marijuana deals with some other people who were present when I interviewed him. Typically these young people only deal marijuana and pills, but at times some of the older ones were dealing harder drugs, although this was small scale and to finance their own use. There is a strange irony in some of their logic. Simon said he only deals ‘…to pay off my fines’. It is as ironical as it is absurd and dangerous.

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Drug taking can therefore be understood from a systems perspective not as an isolated ‘problem’ but as a part of a whole lifestyle. It was not an unusual response to psychological pain and lack of access to mainstream society. The outcomes of the young people’s using drugs to cope with and to avoid psychological pain included participation in a lifestyle which led some to addiction and, more typically, to crime. These dealers, the young people who got involved in drugs and who came to The Shop, are not rich, nor are they obviously evil or bad as society constructs and stigmatizes them. They, because of their backgrounds (class, economic factors, psychological and then social abuse), become involved in a process, a system that leads in a certain direction: to crimes like dealing and robbery and thus to the legal system and its inexorable mechanisms. Simon had been through an alcohol program but was still in the same social circle and drinking when I met him in 1990. A young woman from The Shop was going through a drug and alcohol program when I contacted her. She said she didn’t want to meet any of The Shop people because ‘I used to socialize with drugs. I don’t want to mix with them [The Shop people] any more. They are still users’. She had been in the social circle of the at risk young people for five years, but hopes to avoid them when she leaves the program so she does not get re-involved in drugs. If we consider social contact a need, one wonders how easy it will be for this young woman to avoid her ‘old’ friends. While we can admire her determination to straighten her life out, it is important to recognize that drug use is a part of a drug use lifestyle which meets other human needs. These include a social network of contacts and friends with common values and expectations. Treating drug taking as a substance abuse which needs only the removal of the addiction, e.g. through a detoxification program, ignores that drug taking is also a lifestyle which meets many psychosocial needs: like a group belonging, providing a sense of place, social acceptance, excitement and pleasure. The psychosocial needs have to be replaced with something meaningful or life could become bloody miserable. A Systems Perspective on the Cooperative Despite all the talk of involvement in The Shop there was really only a limited capacity for people to be involved full time if they did not want to go on nut rounds. Joseph did most of the tasks, and trained Peter. There was not the time, the provision for training, or capacity to have many full time active members on the business side. The work of packing and labelling was labour intensive. The Shop was providing young people with somewhere to go and things to do. It was ‘doing good’ for the at risk. Yet The Shop served other functions that also linked the two groups: the opt outs and the dropped outs. The Shop gave the anarchists and Christians meaning in their lives and a position in the wider community as people engaged in productive and non-exploitative work that assisted groups at risk: the young unemployed, the ex-psychiatric patients, those with disabilities. Those involved were featured on the radio, in the local newspaper and were invited to give talks to community groups. Politicians visited. Joseph stated how it was the first opportunity he had to live out his ideals. The opt outs also needed the at risk young people precisely because they were at risk from the dominant society. They were needed not as powerful or socially equal people but as people at risk because this demonstrated The Shop’s social difference. The at risk were evidence and a visual manifestation of the Christians’ and anarchists’ very criticisms of the dominant society. The young people’s ‘at riskness’ was a social construction. It

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reflected the way the dominant society reacted to and treated people with limited social and emotional resources, providing them with no/few opportunities and so turning them into outcasts. So the young people’s presence showed The Shop’s difference to mainstream capitalism: it accepted the unaccepted. The young at risk’s presence gave The Shop and the workers a lot of kudos in the wider community.6 The fact that the young people lacked the opportunity to take power at The Shop was not a deliberate subjugation but it was a latent consequence of the structure of The Shop. Nik, one of the at risk, was obtaining skills and a position of influence in The Shop. She was in the process of gaining the skills to enter the mainstream. She tried to assume power, and to get rid of Joseph who stood between her and control of The Shop. This was not welcomed by the others in power: the Christians, the anarchists and, although unacknowledged because of my position, by myself. There was a lot of controversy. It could be viewed that Nik had become empowered beyond the level that was acceptable. She had tried to take power. This was contrary to cooperative principles, but it was also contrary to the power status quo in which there were powerless and powerful people. There was no room for the at risk to redefine a reality for their needs. A systems analysis of The Shop could look at The Shop as an organism of interdependent parts where the hierarchy was embedded and not ranked. There was a mutual dependency and a struggle for power. The Christians and anarchists wanted to help the oppressed, the needy, as their willingness to help showed their difference to the unjust/oppressive ruling order. The at risk needed and wanted the social and economic support of The Shop. There were therefore functions that the at risk were performing that made them intrinsic to the purpose of the place, and they could not therefore simply be constructed as a drain. They were implicated in multiple ways in the functioning of the whole.7 It was not recognized by the opt outs that they too needed the at risk for their own social and emotional needs to be met. For all of us, ‘We ourselves want to be needed, we do not only have needs, we are also strongly motivated by neededness’ (Andras Angyal, quoted in Meyeroff, 1971:24). Escaping ‘At Risk’ through the Politics of Deconstruction In this section I will firstly consider who the at risk are and then what ‘at risk’ implies. I consider and use deconstruction as a process exposing the politics implicit in a theory or way of looking because it involves re-looking, a form of critical appraisal and a re-examination of what is taken for granted or ‘obvious’.8 Werner (1971, 1989), Nichol (1985) and Anthony and Cohler (1987) have investigated research on the factors which enabled young people to escape from an at risk background. These writers employ a particular psychological framework. On one level this has a positive function as it serves to recognize, and work for, the alleviation of the qualities and conditions that make up ‘at riskness’. On another level, in the very act of defining a group as at risk they are created into an ‘other’ from a supposedly neutral norm (de Beauvoir, 1949/81) and the implication is that the norm is somehow healthier. Such a framework is therefore not neutral, but a way of looking at, and constructing, a reality. Each psychological framework has, therefore, a social, philosophical and political position which has implications for the dominant hegemony, as, in this case, it constructs a group of people as ‘different to’, and not as barred from, the mainstream society.

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Consequently, for the at risk to cease being at risk there needs to be change: perceptual as well as structural. For Werner (1989) the criteria of being no longer at risk included having a good job and perhaps obtaining further education. Peter from The Shop is therefore no longer at risk: he has a good job. However, he stated he used more marijuana than before. He also said his peers at work were heavy users. But Peter has acquired a legal and respectable livelihood. Peter ceases to be at risk now because he works at something society endorses. However, Peter said he was not happy in his work and described his marijuana use as an escape. So the drug is still functioning as a pain killer. However, this ceases to be relevant as such because Peter fits in to what society constructs as appropriate. Nik has not escaped being at risk in Werner’s terms. She is still dependent on welfare, has no qualifications and is soon to be a single mother. However, she is happy in her lesbian relationship. She no longer drinks heavily or smokes much. She considers herself as successful because she organized and succeeded in artificially inseminating herself and was going to give birth to a child in a couple of months. She will give birth to a baby that will, if her financial situation does not change, be at risk. The way at risk is constructed, by Werner, is largely in economic and educational terms. Economic and educational success are directly equated with being healthy and not at risk. While accepting that poverty is a factor in being at risk, I argue that there are other possibly equally important facets beyond the economic and educational dimensions. These may include spiritual, emotional and social well-being which are hard to measure when not pathological. Nik appeared and spoke as being more content than Peter. The Public Service, Peter’s workplace, appeared to be causal in Peter’s increased illegal drug use. He spoke about how boring it was and how this resulted in his increased drug use. The Public Service appears to be a high risk environment, but it is not perceived as such and not defined as such. It is a ‘respectable’ and legitimate way of earning money in the dominant hegemony. Such environments are less accessible to researchers, and pathologies, problems and crime within them are less public. The more socially powerful people are the less likely they are to be visible as at risk—such as in the middle classes (see Schwendinger and Schwendinger, 1976; Nye, 1958). Emotional disorders amongst such people are only relevant if they become obvious pathologies. Being economically at risk is a consequence of being dependent on welfare. Being in receipt of pensions is not viewed as positive. Apart from the influence of the work ethic, this is largely because the likelihood of retaining a good quality of life on the dole or on a pension is minimal. The dole, welfare payments, are below the poverty line. The interplay between poverty and being at risk is clear in the literature (for example, Rutter and Madge, 1977; Liffman, 1978; and Duncan, 1984). The poverty line could therefore be constructed as a stress line, and being at risk a consequence of the social acceptance of poverty as a stress. Accepting that some people should not be in receipt of an adequate income indicates a social perception of the worth of these individuals. It suggests an acceptance of placing people at risk from poverty. It suggests that those who are not working are valued less than workers and suggests a social acceptance that such people should be under stress. It indicates an acceptance that the potential of these people and their children should be stunted because it accepts that they should suffer greater stress and the consequence that they are less likely to attain their potential. The social structure of welfare payments creates people at risk. Such an interpretation would indicate that being risk is a product of how society values a particular group of people; whereas the particular psychological framework of Werner (1989), Nichol (1985) and

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Anthony and Cohler (1987) suggests that being at risk is a product of the individual’s response, their resilience. Similarly, the factors which define ‘resilience’ are not neutral. The at risk are therefore a social construction that stems from a political perspective. There are underlying assumptions about how people in society should behave which ignore, to a large extent, opportunity. (For example, the work ethic implies that people should hold paid employment; it does not acknowledge that people who may want to work are unable to do so). The at risk are defined, and so constructed, as those who do not value education and drop out of school, who do not fit in to a work environment and who are economically unproductive. This construction does not automatically draw attention to structural questions about access and the emphasis tends to be on intervention (with an ‘other’) and not reform of a system. The construction reinforces the status quo in society. The label ‘at risk’ is attributed to particular individuals within society and not to the structure of society. Another way of describing this reality is a systems approach which looks at society as a whole and determines that if parts of the whole are not ‘well’ then the whole is not well, or is at risk. Fisher (1990:38) notes how a ‘systemic approach allows environmental dislocation to be dissolved by restructuring the way the “problem” is perceived’. In another construction societal values such as the desirability of being wealthier than others can be seen, not as health, but causal in creating a society at risk. The problems and issues of poverty, in this construction, cease to lie with the poor, and the wealthy can be seen as responsible for placing society at risk through their overconsumption. From such a perception the role of psychologists and social workers could be redefined so the focus would cease to be on the poor. They would investigate why the wealthy feel it necessary to over-consume. Counsellors could be brought in to ‘clients’ who have too much housing, too many material goods and who use too much energy. Each unnecessary or frivolous item of clothing, every duplication of machine and car would be a cause for professional concern, intervention and report writing. Budget counselling could be offered to help individuals recognize what their priorities should be. The pathologically well-off could be treated along with their symptoms of gross disregard for the resources of the world, and their lack of responsibility to the earth. Sociologists could point out structural causes which lead to the problems and issues around wealth. The more punitive might consider the necessity of a legal response and possible jail sentences for those who continue to place the society at risk. In conclusion, I would argue that deconstruction is political and can be used to look at and question the definition of those at risk and terms such as oppression in our society. While I acknowledge that both society and oppression can also be deconstructed such actions are also political. ‘Problems’ are constructions that reflect positions of power and contingent legitimacy. Deconstruction does not have to lead to nihilism and can lead to further political and social insights about power/patriarchy and dominance. While a systems analysis is another way of seeing and deconstructing boundaries, it also leads to a philosophical postion which has broad social and political implications.

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Conclusions Process This study indicated that empowering young people at risk is possible. However, it requires political and social action. Young people need support in order to gain the skills to get and retain work, training or education. So there need to be more programs not only offering support and special training, but also where the young people’s needs for a place to which they can belong are met, and the relationships between those involved are critical. There need to be additional incentives to encourage young people to attend—especially if they are from lower socio-economic, underclass and/ or abused backgrounds. Some at risk are more disadvantaged than others and will need additional support. Socializing with friends and hanging out is a low risk pursuit for young people at risk. They are familiar with it. It will not cause them to lose their self respect or dignity. But searching for work or attending a program carries risks of psychological and social rejection and no short term benefits. To choose such a course in this context is not motivating but threatening. Courses are comparable to school where the at risk have already failed. I argue for the need for incentives because these (young) people require choice to be empowered. What they choose, because of social constructs of what is worthwhile, may be in part determined by our materialist society. However, at least they would have the option of access, an option which most people appear to take advantage of. Political Implications We observe the world through our constructs, so what we see is not certainty but an aspect of reality which we organize. In my reflexive research I considered myself as an actor in how I was constructing the observations I made. I deconstructed some of the constructs I brought to my initial research data by considering how my own background and later experiences influenced what I saw and could see. My ‘new’ experiences in the intervening years enabled me partially to step outside myself and see my own constructs. Gadamer’s concept of bildung (education, self-formation) is that ‘we become different people, that we “remake” ourselves as we read more, talk more, and write more’ (Rorty, on Gadamer, 1979:359). Gadamer’s bildung applied to the researcher, suggests the possibility of looking back on data to see it anew and to reconstruct a reality, as I have done. This indicates the importance of considering the researcher as an actor who shapes what they can see and indicates how the researcher is a subjective recorder of events, influenced by their experiences and knowledge. (This has been shown by, for example, Kohler Riessman (1987) who considers the impact of the researcher’s class, race and gender, and by Friedrich (1986) who considers how his background experiences influenced his research interests). The way we see, our constructs, are then political and thus deconstruction is, I would argue, a political process. However, the politics of postpositivist philosophy, when it is applied, is not clear, outside of feminist theory: ‘Unlike postmodernism, feminist theory is an intellectual system that knows its politics…’ (Masica-Lees et al, 1989:7–8). So feminist theory has a clear political concern,‘…directed toward securing recognition that the feminine is as crucial an element of the human as the masculine and thus a politics skeptical and critical of traditional “universal truths’” (Mascia-Lees et al, 1989:8).

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However, outside of feminism, Wickham (1990) sees the political possibilities of postmodernism as meaning that ‘concepts like democracy, humanitarianism, class, freedom and culture have to be accessed both in terms of general theoretical debates and in terms [of] the different ways they’re understood and used, or not used, in other particular political sites’ (Wickham, 1990:130). This implies ontology has to be considered not as an abstract debate but for the political implications of such meanings. My study indicated that the construction of terms like at risk are ways of seeing which are inextricably linked to power relations within society. These relations may go unrecognized and unchallenged, but the lack of recognition means underlying assumptions may go unchallenged and unquestioned. In my role of researcher I showed how I considered a group as other to myself. So the dominant hegemony extends far beyond a powerful group but into the very way that we see and do not see. So even those who may consider themselves as advocates for the disadvantaged may be repressive (operating in a patriarchal paradigm of dominance) by placing in the role of victims those on whose behalf they advocate. This realization has profound implication for the construction of any socially just notion of empowerment. Welfare, good intentions and attempts to normalize the ‘at risk’ may in fact further disempower them. Feminist theory’s politics may help to develop a politics for disadvantaged others in our community. I had constructed the at risk as deviant others with problems, and not as humans responding normally to different levels of rejection and abuse. My research suggested that deconstruction can expose covert power relations and consequent political implications, or political sites embedded in our ways of seeing. In the next section I deconstruct ‘at risk’ and draw conclusions about politics and empowerment (as empowerment is a political view of truth) and suggest that researchers should own their frameworks, assumptions and experience in order to make apparent that they describe their constructed reality from a political site and not from a position of ‘truth’. ‘Place’: Acceptance, Belonging (membership) and Relationship In my research experience some at risk young people, who had suffered psychological abuse, were empowered in particular ways that contributed to the resolution of their psychological abuse. This appeared to be associated with their having a place to which they could belong. At The Shop they found acceptance, membership of a community (and a consequent sense of belonging) and positive relationships. (These findings are similar to Wehlage et al. (1989) who looked at schools that were successful with the at risk.) In this context counselling occurred, not through formal therapy, but through relationships with people they knew and trusted. These features, combined with the passing on of skills and knowledge, seem important for the at risk to develop ‘resilience’ as indicated by their accessing the mainstream system. For example when John came into contact with and joined the cooperative, he was depressed and suicidal. He considered that at The Shop he came into an environment that was accepting and to which he felt he belonged. In The Shop he was exposed to new ideas and an alternative lifestyle. He was given insights and understandings about how to aim for something outside of the system but he also learnt an acceptable, for him, point of access into the system: education. When I contacted him in my follow-up research he was in England (he had been deported from Australia as an illegal immigrant) and was completing his undergraduate degree and planning to go on to a Master’s. He linked his experiences at The Shop as instrumental in his development as a person. He wrote that at The Shop

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I was introduced to a diverse range of ideas, values, and people, that were previously missing. Basically it began a period of…personal growth. On the same level I think it also began a process that is still at work today, that being the gradual realization of my own potential and the responsibility I have for my own actions. ‘Place’: Social and Psychological Apart from structural access to the mainstream, the at risks’ background experiences appeared to be very significant in terms of their succeeding or failing to be empowered to join the mainstream. The difficulty of young people, who had inappropriate parenting, in developing trust relationships appeared to be a significant issue. John, like the other young people who moved on from the at risk category, had a stable and positive relationship with an adult for an extended period of time as a child. Such a relationship appeared to have provided a base for the at risk to be able to build on the trust they had experienced and to develop new relationships in the supportive environment of The Shop. The capacity to trust appeared to be associated with their going on to gain skills, where there were limited opportunities, and so accessing mainstream society. A second issue that advantaged those young people who had got out of at risk environments was experience with mainstream norms including stable accommodation, and a parent in regular employment. The young people from an underclass background where their parents had been employed spasmodically appeared to have greater difficulty in accessing the mainstream perhaps because their experience had exposed them to knowledge of, but not experience in, the benefits of the mainstream system. Human Needs: A Systems Perspective When I applied a systems analysis to drug use my study indicated that belonging to a community was very important in meeting emotional and social needs. Consequently, young people who have been abused and rejected need access to a community that meets their social and emotional needs without stifling their potential. Money, access and esteem are linked in our society. Most of the young people in this study either had no official income or were on the dole which is well below the poverty line and the severe poverty line. In initially giving these payments the rationale was that they be able to sustain people between jobs. Unemployment benefit was supposed to be a safety net. We now live in a period of sustained and continuing unemployment which is hitting certain groups, like the young and the unskilled, much harder than others. Unemployment benefit was never set up with the purpose of sustaining the social or emotional needs of people in the context of a society which encourages people to consume and affords status to those with significant material goods. People have basic needs for self esteem. These young people were typically rejected or abused in their families, they had few material possessions and lacked access to traditional employment to develop their self esteem in ways society deems acceptable. Without this access and with low self esteem they reacted by drinking, drug taking, crime, self abuse and the like. They became members of a sub culture where their social and emotional needs were met not only by the drugs but by the whole street and drug culture. The drug community provided them with a place to belong which mainstream society had not done. In this context their actions were comprehensible consequences of

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unmet human needs and an understandable response to particular social and psychological circumstances. Relationship, Interconnectedness, Empowerment and Love I have identified the need for a community to belong to a social and psychological place that is safe and where people can experience accepting and positive relationships. The study indicated that the quality of the relationship is very important in terms of the worker or the researcher understanding those termed at risk. Part of the relationship is connecting with the ‘others’ to see how and why we see them in a particular way. I, with a different knowledge base and experiences, had seen the at risk as separate others to myself and their actions as inappropriate response. Through my reflection I attempted to show how my constructs and experience were preventing me from understanding that group, and causing me to continue to structure them as ‘other’ to me. (I have discussed the political consequences above.) Mathews (1989) states, ‘Our psychological identity and epistemic stance are to a certain extent socially and culturally constructed’ (p. 5). Mathews argues that the new metaphysic of interconnectedness calls for a new relationship between knower and known which I consider is a relevant concept in empowerment. The at risk are defined in terms of an opposite, a group who are assumed to be not at risk. Using a perspective of interconnectedness this binary opposition could not take place as an individual’s or a group’s at riskiness cannot be separated from the ‘at riskness’ of our society—as the part belongs to and is not separate from the whole. Empowerment is then a part of a micro process of seeing the connectedness of self and ‘other’ and a macro process of seeing the relationship of the sub-group to the society and the world. If a recognition of our interconnectedness existed on a micro and macro level, and became an underlying assumption behind how we acted, there would be a limited need for psychologists, social welfare workers and environmentalists as these professions arise out of our alienation from each other and our earth. Their role indicates our failure to see and act in terms of our relatedness and interdependence with each other and with the environment (a perspective that links in with deep ecology (Naess, 1986 and 1989)). I therefore concluded that a part of an empowerment process is a way of seeing, or trying to see, ourselves as connected to each other and the earth. We are only theoretically non-‘at risk’ when we are bound up in a system that damages others and the earth. Such a way of seeing is implicit in having the capacity for development and love, the capacity to empower and be empowered. Maturana and Varela state: …we can expand our cognitive domain. This arises through a novel experience brought forth through reasoning, through encounter with a stranger, or, more directly, through the expression of a biological congruence that lets us see the other person and open up for him room for existence beside us. This is the act of love… Anything that undermines the acceptance of others, from competency to the possession of truth and on to ideological certainty, undermines the social process because it undermines the biological process that generates it (1987:246–7). Such a relationship involves seeing/perceiving the subject not as other to and negative, but as a part of the social self. In this perception, space is created for the other as we see ourselves in them and

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they in us: I in thou. Buber (1970) states we can see a person as an ‘other’, as an object, an ‘it’, or alternatively as a ‘thou’, that is a part of our social and personal self. In seeing a person as ‘thou’, the empowerer is also empowered: ‘Only as the other is truly thou for me, do I truly become I for myself Cain on Marcel (1963:36). This does not dismiss difference, but perceives difference as a place for the development of both: in a I-thou relationship. So the process of empowerment is a part of the act of love. As Fromm states (1959:32): ‘Love is one aspect of what I have called the productive orientation: the active and creative relatedness of man to his fellow man, to himself and to nature’. Maturana and Varela (1987:248) consider this part of our very ontology. We have delved into the social dynamics which points up a basic ontological feature of our human condition that is no longer a mere assumption, that is, we have only the world that we bring forth with others, and only love helps us bring it forth. Ultimately empowerment is about the finding of ourselves in the other, and in this, the other ceases to be other to ourselves. Consequently, we are empowered with others: we cannot ‘empower the at risk’ without acknowledging that the process is contingent on us being less powerful, less judgmental. We are all at risk and we create at riskness by taking away from others a way to fulfil human needs, by our over-consumption of material things and by our power over, instead of with, others. Our societal values and dominant constructs see power and wealth as desirable. A consumer view of ‘others’ links to society’s values and norms which are bound up with consumerism, and ongoing development being perceived only in terms of ‘growth’—which assumes infinite resources. The values in this process, I argued, foster the actual production of a group that can be defined as at risk. In such a process we create at riskness, exploit people and limit their potential. Fromm states: ‘Only when man ceases to be a consumer item for his stronger “fellow” man can our cannibalistic, prehistoric period end and our truly human history begin’ (1986:144). Deconstructing the term ‘at risk’ reveals that the values and ideology of growth and overconsumption actually place all of society and the earth at risk. Consequently, we are all at risk and not just a socially constructed group in society. This indicates changes have to take place on a macro level; otherwise, empowering the group termed at risk, the most vulnerable to the social norm of consumerism, will be an ongoing process, with the group, so defined, ever increasing as our resources become ever depleted and our relationships ever more alienated. In such a society people would lose the capacity to see the self in the other, and difference would be constructed as unacceptable. Final remarks The results of my research experience did not lead me to a set of skills and processes or a particular methodology about how to empower (which I had believed was the issue when I commenced this research). It led me to consider the primary basis of empowerment (as distinct from the giving of power). It is more than people seeing the hands of those in need as human hands (Freire, 1968:29); it is to work with people, to connect, to understand, but more importantly to see and feel ourself in the other, so that the otherness disappears, not in a necessarily mystical sense, but through a

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pragmatic attempt to understand how we objectify and why we cannot relate to ‘them’. Relationship, acceptance, belonging and place are key to empowerment. But social and structural processes need to embrace psychological and philosophical aspects to arrive at a way of constantly re-visioning the consequences of one’s framework and assumptions about the ‘subject’ (person, group or world). To empower is to see the self not in isolation from, but connected to, and in, others. To be involved in empowerment is not to see the self as a giver, but as involved in an experience of reciprocity. It is not to develop sameness but to understand the human reasons behind our difference while respecting human needs. It is working towards seeing the self, through deconstruction and construction of realities, attempting to be neutral, while acknowledging the impossibility of such a reality, and, importantly, owning beliefs/‘knowledge’ as perceptions which should be open to reappraisal. Empowerment is relevant on a micro and macro level: the two are interconnected and implicit to individuals and society as achieving of potential for development. We as a society cannot ignore all the costs, social, personal and economic, of the creation and neglect and disempowerment of any group like the at risk. All people are deserving of a life that accesses their potential and fulfils their needs. Demanding action on behalf of and with these people is not charity but connected to our very development as a healthy society and world. Notes 1 I use ‘out of home’ as a preferred term (as used in Kennedy et al. (1987)) instead of ‘homeless’. It encompasses the idea that a home is a safe place where physical and psychological needs are met. Thus a person who is in a violent living situation where they are not safe, is psychologically without a home. The concept of ‘out of home’ therefore embraces a wide, and what I consider to be a useful, range of living circumstances that cover the situations of the young people in my research:

• A person in a living situation where they are exposed to danger. • A person who does not have reasonable security (a squat could be this, or a person who is forced to move from place to place because their care is only offered on a temporary basis); such a person may also be periodically on the streets. • A person who has nowhere to live. 2 Nyoongah = a generic term for Aboriginal people from the south west of western Australia. 3 ’male dominated’: I consider patriarchy is a power domination and a mode of thinking which while gender typical is not gender specific. It is a powerful socialization force which is much more directed at males (gender) and therefore much more typical, but is not exclusively male (gender). The structure of all major institutions is hierarchical and competitive. For women to “succeed” in a patriarchal society some behave and think like patriarchs. As Mathews (1989) states ‘…feminine gender development is susceptible to pathologies…’. 6). 4 Many of the drugs the young people used were in fact legally prescribed: serepax, valium and rohypnol. The dealers who sold the drugs illegally on the streets were other young people who claimed to have got their supply by visiting a variety of doctors and telling the ‘appropriate story’—depression, inability to sleep and the like—to get hold of these drugs. 5 ‘acid’ = L.S.D. 6 In social welfare, workers are similarly provided with meaning, purpose and income but the meaning is contingent on having/serving the oppressed.

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7 This has implications for social services and social welfare, as when a whole bureaucracy and welfare employment system is built around the poor/oppressed, it is contrary to the needs of the system that the input, the at risk, disappear. The ‘advocates for the poor’ are therefore advocates for their own needs. Both are mutually dependent. 8 Deconstruction does not lead automatically to nihilism. It is a process which produces new constructs or ways of seeing that give rise to consequent reflections. Deconstruction gives reconstructions which are not necessarily negating what has gone before but possibly refining such observations of reality.

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TRONTO, J. (1987) ‘Beyond gender difference to a theory of caring’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 12, 4, pp. 644–63. VIDICH, A. (1955) ‘Participant Observation and the Interpretation of Data’, American Journal of Sociology, 60, pp. 354–60. VON BERTALANFFY, L. (1975) Perspectives on General Systems Theory, New York, George Braziller. VON FOERSTER, H. (1986) Seeing With The Third Eye A Day and a Night With Heinz Von Foerster, Videorecording of Lectures in June. WEBB, E.J. CAMPBELL, D.T., SCHWARTZ, R.D., and SECHREST, L. (1966) Unobtrusive Measures: Non Reactive Research in the Social Sciences, Charaz, Rand McNally. WEHLAGE, G., RUTTER, R., SMITH, G., LESKO, N., and FERNANDEZ, R. (1989) Reducing The Risk: schools as communities of support, London, The Falmer Press. WERNER, E. (1989) ‘High-Risk Children in Young Adulthood: a longitudinal study from birth to 32 Years’, American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 59, 1, January. WERNER, E., BIERMAN, J.M., and FRENCH, F.E. (1971) The Children of Kauai, University of Hawaii Press. WHYTE, W.F. (1956) Street Corner Society, The University of Chicago Press. WICKHAM, G. (1990) ‘The politial possibilities of postmodernism’, Economy and Society, 19, 1, February. WILBER, K. (1983) Eye To Eye: the quest for the new paradigm, New York, Anchor Books. WITTGENSTEIN, L. (1972) On Certainty, Ed. G.E.ANSCOMBE and G.H.VON WRIGHT, New York, Harper and Rowe. WITTGENSTEIN, L. (1980) Culture and Capital, Oxford, Basil Blackwell. WOOLGAR, S. (1988) in WOOLGAR, S. (Ed.) Knowledge and Reflexivity, London, Sage Publications, pp. 14– 34.

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3 Women in a Male Domain: Gender and Organizational Culture in a Christian Brothers College Lawrence Angus

In this chapter gender inequality in schooling is examined through a case study of aspects of the construction of masculine subjectivity in a boys’ school, and of the encounter of women teachers with its gender regime. The women are shown to be in an inequitable position in relation to their male colleagues in a variety of ways. In preparing the chapter I have revisited data collected during an ethnographic study that I conducted over several years as a participant observer in Christian Brothers College (CBC) in the provincial Australian city of Newburyport,1 in the early to mid 1980s.2 The study was published as Continuity and Change in Catholic Schooling: An Ethnography of a Christian Brothers College in Australian Society (Angus, 1988). Although identified early in the research as an important theme (Bates, 1986), gender was treated in that book as a general feature of organizational life at CBC but not as a central issue. While the organizing theme for the book was social and cultural production and reproduction, this amounted in effect to an analysis of the part played by the school in the production of suitable young men for a differentiated labour market. Tensions created in the school by religious changes, a changing population of teachers, curricular pressures and changes in the local political economy were illuminated. In particular, constructions of class, hegemony and high-status knowledge were examined in an attempt to explore the relationship between the school and particular status groups. Through an emphasis on agency and structure, school dynamics were located within larger social movements and within a broad social and economic context. In retrospect, gender—as a fundamental aspect of the culture of CBC as an organization, of Catholicism and of Christian Brothers’ traditions, and also as an element of cultural production and contestation at CBC—could well have served as the central organizing theme through which various aspects of CBC might have been interpreted. The particular purpose of this chapter is not to speculate about how the book might have been different had the central focus been upon gender. Rather, my intention here is to examine gender as an aspect of background rules and hegemonic culture as they are mediated within the institutional context of Christian Brothers College (CBC), Newburyport. I have argued elsewhere that a critical ethnographic approach (Anderson, 1989) is appropriate for such a project (Angus, 1987). I recognize, however, that my approach in this chapter is somewhat problematic. For one thing, there is a gap of several years now since the data that I shall employ in the chapter were collected. Moreover, I shall be using the data to elaborate upon a theme, the significance of which, while it was not excluded from my original analysis, was not fully appreciated at the commencement of the project. The foreshadowed problem concerned structures and processes of continuity and change— but these were seen by and large as structures and processes of class and religion. While this focus

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broadened as I began to explore the social dynamics of the school and its community, it is only since withdrawing from the site that I have attempted to probe more fully the complexities of gender structuring and subjectivity, and their implications for organizational and social change. Nonetheless, I would argue that the relationship between theory and any set of data is never static. We analyze data as we collect it, as we write it up, and as we continue to reflect upon and work through various explanations of it. During all this time our thinking is also influenced by alternative theories and theoretical developments. My own position at CBC during the extensive period of research, as participant-observer and ethnographer, was also problematic. I had been teaching at the school for two years before formally collecting any data, I had myself been taught at a Christian Brothers secondary school in another city fifteen years earlier, I had been raised in a Catholic family on a farm. While at the time of the study, and now, I maintained an intense interest in modern Catholicism as a social and political phenomenon, I was not and am not ‘religious’. This background has no doubt influenced my own gender attitudes in ways that are partly unclear and inaccessible to me. Although I have consciously modified gender attitudes that pervaded the rural, sporting, clerical and masculinist environments of my childhood and early adult years, gender biases undoubtedly run deeply, as was indicated in my case by the occlusion of gender analysis as a central theme in my initial ethnography of CBC. While CBC, as a single-sex school for boys, is of general interest as a site of production of forms of masculinity which contribute to broad gender inequality, the particular emphasis of this paper is on the encounter of women teachers with the school and its prevailing maleness. Like other schools, and other organizations, CBC is a cultural site in which broad social expectations and relationships (such as gender relationships) are sustained and developed while also mediated and refracted so that they are given a particular quality in their specific context. CBC is of particular interest for this purpose because, until fairly recent times, it had been virtually an all-male institution, and the very fact of its single-sex nature highlights the significance of gender in the organization of CBC. In this chapter I attempt to do three things. Firstly, I advance an argument for the importance of the consideration of gender dynamics as part of organizational culture, and of the relationship of this to social structure and the formation of subjectivity. Secondly, I focus on the gender regime of CBC, especially as it is highlighted by the encounter of women teachers with the daily life of the school. This is illustrated by reference to versions of masculinity that are prevalent at CBC, the symbol of the Virgin Mary, the place and nature of discipline in the school, and its hierarchical form of administration. Finally, I examine the responses of women to their encounter with CBC in terms of possibilities for organizational reform. Gender Dynamics in Society and Organizations The issue of gender has largely escaped attention in the literature on educational administration and school organization until very recently (see Blackmore, 1989; Sampson, 1987). Indeed, Shakeshaft (1986), in a comprehensive synthesis of research in the field, concluded that most of the literature available does not grapple with issues of gender construction. The research is characterized by quantitative studies of occupants of administrative positions, or analyses of the characteristics of women who hold such positions. Treatment of gender politics, according to Shakeshaft (1986), is, even in this limited literature, usually confined to the identification of particular barriers to access to

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administrative positions that are faced by women. In research in education more generally, however, since the mid-1970s gender has emerged as a prominent issue (Spender and Sarah, 1980; Whyte, 1985; Yates, 1986). Perhaps the major strand in much of this research has been the investigation of differential treatment of girls and boys in schools and the identification of practices that discriminate against girls. Although the emphasis in the literature still remains on pupils and the problem of access of girls to traditionally male dominated areas of the curriculum (Carpenter, 1985; Ives, 1984; Kelly, 1981, 1985; Leder, 1980), increasingly attention is being given to the construction of masculinity and femininity in schools through hegemonic school practices that are manifest in, especially, the sexual division of labour in teaching (Apple, 1986; Sampson, 1987; Yates, 1983). Recent biographical (Connell, 1985) and historical (Apple, 1986) work has also attempted to uncover the implications of gender and gender politics in the construction of teachers’ work and school organization. The institutional context of CBC, with the presence of women becoming strongly apparent only relatively recently, provides an interesting site for the examination of gender dynamics at work in a particular school. While no claim is being made for the general representativeness of CBC as an organizational culture incorporating universal gender attitudes, the ‘maleness’ of CBC as an institution may not necessarily lead to an especially exaggerated situation of female subordination compared with the pattern of power relations between the sexes that prevails in society more broadly. To put the matter simply and bluntly: There is an ordering of versions of femininity and masculinity at the level of the whole society, in some ways analogous to the patterns of face-to-face relationship within institutions… Their interrelationship is centred on a single structural fact, the global dominance of men over women (Connell, 1987:183). The argument is that organizational cultures, including that of CBC, reflect at least in part structural features of society at large. Institutions are created within, and exist in relationship with, that society. This implies, in regard to relationships between men and women and what is perceived to be their appropriate roles, that society, despite its diversity, is characterized by a ‘gender order’ (Matthews, 1984; Connell, 1987) which is socially and historically constituted. Its ongoing constitution is always problematic and provisional, however, and occurs largely as a result of differential power relationships, cultural expectations and access to resources between the sexes. The effect of these is that particular patterns of relationships between the sexes are largely regarded as normal. Such patterns, however, must be actively constructed through the responses of women and men to the complex practices and tensions which characterize their lives. Thus, while avoiding a narrowly structuralist perspective, it is possible to argue that, through a dialectical relationship between agency and structure, specific institutions like schools will also have their own gender order or ‘gender code’ (MacDonald, 1980). Connell (1987:98; see also Kessler et al, 1985) provides a useful distinction in terminology here. In describing the nature of sexual politics, he uses the term ‘gender order’ to refer broadly to ‘the structural inventory of an entire society’. The term ‘gender regime’ is then used to refer more specifically to ‘the structural inventory of a particular institution’. While there is a good deal of institutional and cultural autonomy associated with gender regimes that might be identified at the

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micro level of organizations, gender attitudes at the institutional level will, in this view, intersect with and mediate prevailing social attitudes and expectations. Connell’s distinction is therefore helpful because it points to a linkage, but not a reductionist or determinist relationship, between broad social structural issues and issues of participants’ social action in everyday life. It recognizes that the constitution of organizational forms by organizational actors must occur within an existing social structure that both constrains and enables their interaction at the micro level. Notions like gender order and gender regime can be difficult for us to grasp however, because as Connell (1987:139) explains: In common sense understanding gender is a property of individual people. When biological determinism is abandoned, gender is still seen in terms of socially produced individual character. It is a considerable leap to think of gender as being also a property of collectivities, institutions and historical processes. We can be assisted in this leap by the realization that many concepts in prevailing western discourse are effectively gendered, at least in cultural terms. Feminists have argued convincingly, for instance, that political power is gendered and influenced by notions of masculinity (Farganis, 1986). Similar claims have been made about notions of militarism and patriotism (Harstock, 1983). Keller (1983) argues that positivist science is male gendered in its cultural attributes and fundamental presuppositions, while Gilligan (1982) claims to identify a female epistemology which incorporates an ‘ethic of care’ and emphasizes notions of understanding and connectedness between persons. Perhaps the notion of gendered cultural concepts is most clearly apparent in the discourse of business and administration where assumptions of impersonality, male aggressiveness, hierarchical leadership and analytical rationality prevail (Ferguson, 1984). The significance of gender in cultural dynamics can also be appreciated by regarding sex as a category which clearly structures the identity and perceptions of people and how they are regarded or valued within organizations and by society (Farganis, 1986:4). For feminists, of crucial importance here in relation to sexual politics is de Beauvoir’s notion that all of society is explicitly gendered with women being relegated to the status of the ‘second sex’: She is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute— she is the Other (de Beauvoir, 1960:20). While it is possible to talk about a general male dominance of the whole society in this way, it is well to remember that the hegemonic form of masculinity ‘is always constructed in relation to various subordinated masculinities as well as in relation to women’ (Connell, 1987:183). There are two important and often overlooked points here. One is that the representation of gender as a male/ female duality implies that all men are in an equally dominant position when, although men in general benefit from prevailing gender relationships, many men, particularly gay men but also others, find the dominant male form oppressive. The second point is that, regardless of some men existing within a dominant masculinity that they may not entirely wish to share, it is against this

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dominant form of masculinity that various forms of subordinated femininity are defined. As Connell (1987:183) summarizes these: One form is defined around compliance to this subordination and is oriented to accommodating the interests and desires of men. I will call this ‘emphasized femininity’. Others are defined centrally by strategies of resistance or forms of non-compliance. Others again are defined by complex strategic combinations of compliance, resistance and cooperation. Thus it seems clear that gender relationships are far from uniform, and the particular character of male/ female interactions can only be understood in particular instances in particular institutions and contexts. Such context specific relationships, however, build into and are influenced by the complex network of gender relations of society as a whole. Within that broad pattern there will be many irregularities and tensions which compound but do not negate the prevailing gender order in which, although no single view holds unchallenged at any time, there is ‘likely to be a kind of “fit” between hegemonic masculinity and emphasized femininity’ (Connell, 1987:185). This fit does not rely on the force of men for its imposition—although force, sexual harassment and violence are often apparent, especially at the level of domestic relationships and, as I shall discuss later, violence has an impact on women both at CBC and more generally. Rather than from coercive imposition, masculine ascendancy is more secure because it follows primarily from the assertion of dominant cultural patterns that are continuously being deconstructed and reconstructed, in which being considered masculine or feminine is a major component of one’s subjectivity and social identity. In particular institutions, or in particular interactions with others, there may be more or less pressure on people to fit in accordance with particular gender expectations. Therefore it is significant that ideologies of domesticity and femininity, which make up the prevailing notions of womanhood within the gender order, extend beyond the sphere of home and family. They also play a large part in the construction of social rules about appropriate types of work that are available to women in the labour force. Such notions, however, are fragmented and often contested so that they never fit together to construct a single framework of gender prescriptions. Gender and Organizational Culture In the past decade or so, organizational analysis and organizational theory have addressed the notion of organizational culture as a major theme of investigation (Ouchi, 1981; Deal and Kennedy, 1982; Smircich, 1983; Angus, 1988, 1989; Bates, 1987; Meek, 1988). In the emergence of a strong body of literature on organizational culture, however, gender has remained at best a marginal theme (Hearn and Parkin, 1983; Mills, 1988). In particular, the marginalization of women in the literature on administration and organization renders the notion of gender largely irrelevant to the analysis. Administration and organization are represented as being appropriately gender neutral when, in most cases, they are in fact seen as being unproblematically male. This is despite increasing attention being given during the past two decades to gender as a central feature of virtually all aspects of social and cultural dynamics in everyday life (Barrett, 1980; Connell, 1987; Eisenstein, 1984). The exclusion of gender, or more particularly of the experience of women, from an academic sub-

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discipline like organizational analysis perhaps should be no surprise when feminist writers have argued that ‘the women’s voice’ (Gilligan, 1982:1) has also remained largely unnoticed in most other academic fields. In her influential work on the gender blindness of psychological theory, for instance, Gilligan (1982:1) strove to expose ‘the recurrent problems in interpreting women’s development and to connect these problems to the repeated exclusion of women from the critical theory building studies of psychological research’. This general academic neglect of course does not excuse the occlusion of gender issues from organizational analysis for, as Mills (1988:351) correctly points out: Given that so much time is expended in defining and refining sexual differences and their consequences, it is remarkable that [such difference] is ignored when it comes to organizational analysis. Very few studies have sought to analyze the relationship of gender to organizational behaviour… The ignoring and marginalization of gender, although not limited to any particular approach within organizational analysis, is inexcusable in the face of growing concern with the experiential aspects of organizations, particularly in regard to the current interest in organizational culture. A handful of analyses which have begun to relate gender to organizational culture have recently appeared in the literature on organizational studies (Riley, 1983; Smircich, 1983; Mills, 1988; Hyde, 1989). One problem emerging from the current interest in culture in organizational analysis, however, is that incompatible notions of culture are employed by different theorists. The predominant perspective in the literature on business and educational administration sees organizational culture as an aspect of institutions that may be manipulated by management in order to enhance organizational commitment and efficiency. That is, the organization and its leadership are seen as generators of particular cultural attributes that are associated with corporate solidarity and a sense of mission or corporate vision (Deal and Kennedy, 1982; Ouchi, 1981). Such a cultural emphasis reflects a view of organizations that is hardly less static and systematic than was assumed in the functionalist organizational sociology that dominated organizational analysis in the 1950s and 1960s (Swingewood, 1975; Meek, 1988). While it must be conceded that vigorous defences of functionalist organizational theory have recently been mounted (Donaldson, 1985), and radical critiques of functionalism (e.g. Benson, 1977; Burrell and Morgan, 1979; Clegg and Dunkerley, 1980; Morgan, 1980) have not widely penetrated the mainstream literature on the study of organizations (Aldrich, 1988), there are good arguments that the functionalist perspective in general, but particularly in relation to the notion of organizational culture, is extremely limiting. I am unable to elaborate those arguments here (see Bates, 1987; Meek, 1988), but of particular significance for the analysis in this chapter is that such a perspective on organizational culture allows virtually no concern for culture as a shifting and contested notion that is continually being constructed and reconstructed, and which must be subjectively understood. Instead, emphasis is upon managerial concerns with the manipulation of and intervention in organizational culture to shape it in ways that are conducive to the realization of organizational goals. Not only is there a lack of appreciation of the importance and complexity of cultural politics, but also there is a takenfor-granted assumption that organizational culture will reflect unproblematically norms and goals which are internalized to form stable, integrated organizational structures.

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A somewhat different and more helpful approach to organizational culture sees organizations as manifestations of cultural forms (Smircich, 1983) or rules (Clegg, 1981) and also as sites of cultural contestation (Benson, 1977; Clegg and Dunkerley, 1980). In other words, in institutions such as schools, rather than a uniform concept of organizational culture simply being imposed from above, or bequeathed from the past, contest occurs over the construction and assertion of cultural forms. Teachers and students, as active and knowing agents, have the capacity to influence organizational culture and structure, while also simultaneously adapting to some extent to strongly institutionalized cultural expectations, both within the institution itself and in society more broadly. In organizations, as in other spheres of social life, cultural forms may become hegemonic when understandings are so strongly entrenched that they become internalized as guides for appropriate action. But organizational culture does not simply bear down upon individuals in an institution so that a monolithic sense of organization is unproblematically sustained. Organizational culture, as part of the social world, must be continuously constituted. It is therefore always imperfectly reconstructed amongst contested discourses and subjectivities. Institutions like schools should therefore be seen as cultural sites (Willis, 1977; Giroux, 1984) in which entrenched expectations and hegemonic understandings act as background rules which influence the action of organizational participants (Clegg, 1981; Giddens, 1976, 1984). And while a particular organizational culture many be associated with specific institutions, these institutions are also influenced by, and partly mediate, broader social structures and societal cultures. That is, if Clegg is correct, organizations, like broader social structures, must be constantly constituted through rules which ‘are not necessarily formally defined by members of the organisation, although they may be’ (Clegg, 1981: 545). These ‘rules’ refer to general understandings of appropriate action by which ‘one can formulate the structure underlying the apparent surface of organisational life’ (Clegg, 1981:545). Such rules have a strong existence in the form of institutionalized expectations. They may not be hard and fast rules and may be mediated in organizations in different ways in different situations involving different people. According to Giddens (1976:121), rules in this way amount to structures which are ‘both constituted by human agency and yet at the same time are the very medium of this constitution’. Giddens emphasizes both the dynamic relationship between structure and agency and the important point that structures do not merely constrain but also enable meaningful choices that may lead to action. Rules, then, largely in the form of institutionalized expectations and values, influence the nature and quality of individual and group participation in organizational life in complex and variable ways. A gender regime in a particular organization could be seen as an illustration of such influence. In examining any set of rules, structures, authority relations or gender regime, however, it is important that, as Clegg (1988:11) reminds us, we keep in mind that ‘organizations are arenas of struggle and loci of calculations in which social relations of and in production are worked out with a degree of indeterminacy’. In the remainder of the chapter, with this caution in mind, the influence and mediation of socially and historically constituted rules in relation to gender and gender subjectivity within the organizational arena of Christian Brothers College, Newburyport, are examined.

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CBC: School for Catholic Boys Established in 1930, CBC has developed many of its own traditions but is also steeped in the traditions of the Irish Christian Brothers and of Roman Catholicism. More than any other religious order, the Congregation of Christian Brothers has dominated the secondary education of Catholic boys in Australia during the past century. Indeed, despite the many orders of religious brothers in Australia, to many Catholics the word ‘Brothers’ refers simply to the Christian Brothers.3 Many fathers, uncles, elder brothers, cousins and grandfathers of current CBC pupils attended CBC or other Brothers’ schools. At the local level, prolonged family involvement with CBC is evident in the Old Boys’ Association and the Christian Brothers Collegians’ Football Club, one of the strongest in the Newburyport and District Football Association, and which field teams at all junior and senior levels of the competition. Support for the Old Boys’ Association is strong, but it is the Football Club through which many former pupils retain links with their old school and schoolmates as supporters, members, players and fathers of members. So significant is the sports emphasis in the life of the school that an often-heard joke is, ‘CBC teaches only one religion— football’. The joke works equally well for those who support the sports emphasis as for those who mock it; being delivered with perhaps a knowing look and a wink in the first case, and an ironic shrug in the latter. The football club, like many similar clubs around Australia, is both a place (clubrooms and a football ground) and a collection of people. Women and girls may be supporters of the club and even associate members, but the business of the club is decidedly masculine. Within the club, many CBC students are encouraged and educated in the ways of an Australian male sports culture. For particular boys, a version of masculinity, which combines physical strength, skill and competitiveness with a capacity to consume large amounts of liquor and sexually dominate females, is reinforced by the informal ethos of such clubs. In this version, women are regarded largely as objects and as necessarily subservient. Elements of this male image are, of course, frowned upon within the official ethos of the school. Perhaps for this reason, the macho image was particularly appealing to students who were resistant to school in general or to teachers within it. Elsewhere, in reporting my early research on disaffected year 11 pupils at CBC (Angus, 1982, 1984), I have discussed elements of the perceptions of schooling of a group of ‘macho’, ‘unacceptable’ students who referred to themselves as the ‘sweathogs’. Many of the school’s outstanding footballers came from this group. Despite a measure of football glory, they believed they were the ‘rejects’ of the school, and differentiated themselves from more ‘acceptable’ pupils who, they said, usually studied maths and science and were ‘smarter’ than they: Interviewer: Jack: Interviewer: Group:

What do you mean, ‘smarter’? They work harder. Is there a difference between you and those kids? …work harder. …we’re dumber (laughter). …they get high marks. …they’re all sucks (laughter).

In a subsequent discussion the distinction was elaborated: Michaeh:

They’re prepared to work all the time and don’t go out.

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Bill:

They don’t have fun in school like us. They’re always serious—always talk about school. Interviewer: Aren’t there any exceptions? Terry: Oh yea, like Richard (nicknamed ‘Errol Flynn’). That’s because he’s good at sport and, you know, he’s kind of social. Baz: You should see the women he gets onto! Terry: There’s not many others. Only a couple who are good at sport are all right. Ken: Most of the others are all different though. Not like us. We’re sort of more radically minded. We do all sorts of things you know. They don’t want to get on the wrong side of teachers, like. They won’t have fun in class. Baz: They’re not social. Like, I reckon everyone in this group here, all right, goes to a party just about every Saturday night. They don’t do nothing. The ‘sweathogs’ distanced themselves from school-related activity which they saw as childish. They believed that their experiences of the ‘real’ world gave them superiority over their ‘smarter’, schooloriented colleagues. Most drank regularly at a particular pub where they often got drunk. The possiblity of getting picked up by the police for under-age drinking added extra excitement. Terry boasted about his recent experiences at King’s Cross; Bill’s reputation had been enhanced since he started going out with a girl two years older than he. Compared to such ‘real’ life achievements they found school dull and trite. While disapproving strongly of the hard drinking and womanizing that is part of the macho image, the Brothers and their associates have been strong supporters of all forms of sporting competition. Successes were publicly recognized at CBC and formed a large part of the agenda for school assemblies. The reputation of members of Christian Brothers schools as fierce sporting competitors is matched by the traditionally combative nature of the Brothers’ social, economic and academic objectives. This point is well expressed by Brother Cas Manion (1977:vii) in his editorial to the hundredth issue of the Christian Brothers’ journal, Studies, in which he reflects upon the Brothers’ schools of the 1930s: The objective of the school was to hand on the Faith intact and ready to fight; to raise the working class boy to a level of prestige in Public Service or Profession; and to attain high levels of examination success in open competition. Also another objective, only slightly lower in estimation than the first, was the ability to challenge the domination of better endowed schools in any field, scholastic or sporting. This sense of competitiveness was directed mainly at Protestant foes who, especially during the interwar years, were regarded, not without reason, as oppressors of Irish-Australian working-class Catholics. Within the schools, too, competition was seen as important in character building and essential to academic success. The competitive ethos was matched somewhat ambivalently with a notion of Catholic solidarity that the Brothers had intended to create by educating working-class boys for placement in middle-class careers. This was considered as important work for the Church in, as one of the younger Brothers at CBC put it, ‘establishing a Catholic community that could

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stand on its own feet in all sorts of areas of society’ to the point where ‘these days, now, you have got people with Catholic backgrounds as leaders in all these groups’. Such male leaders were regarded as the successful products of Brothers’ schools, and afforded current pupils an alternative masculine image to that of the resistant, macho male. Within this approved version of masculinity, boys were encouraged to be ‘responsible young men’. Typical examples of these were the boys who were elected by their peers to be captains of the school. In each of the years of my association with CBC, a boy of considerable sporting ability, who was also academically successful and regarded as being of sound moral character, was elected. As far as I am aware, and I was in a good position to know, the election was never rigged and the principal never felt it necessary to employ his power of veto to overrule the students’ choice. The principal and other senior teachers in the school did usually impress upon the boys the importance of electing an appropriate person to such a significant position. Such cautions were hardly necessary, however, as even boys who were regarded as resistant usually took the election seriously and seemed to have had a very clear notion of the type of boy that was required. While responsible young men might succumb to the temptations of the flesh just as resistant pupils like the ‘sweathogs’ did (and their excesses and indiscretions would be widely reported amongst pupils precisely because they were ‘responsible young men), they were expected to comply with the goals of the school. That was largely what ‘responsibility’ (and the associated term, ‘maturity’) effectively meant at CBC. In this respect, the line between being a ‘responsible young man’ and being a ‘suck’ (an insulting term for a compliant student) was hazy and fudged. It had to do largely with a sense of cool detachment that separated responsible young men who had, in a sense, proved themselves, from the ‘sucks’ who were overly conformist and tried too hard to please. There were other versions of masculinity available to boys at CBC but these two, resistant ‘macho’ and ‘responsible young man’, seemed to me to be dominant. The greatest insult a pupil could deliver to another was to doubt his masculinity by referring to him as a ‘poofter’ or as a ‘girl’. In the pupil hierarchy boys who were physically weak or shy were likely to be regarded as ‘girls’. At all year levels there was continual joking about ‘poofters’, both inside and outside classrooms, by male teachers as well as boys. In such ways some boys were identified as ‘not real boys’ (Spender, 1982) and became the butt of numerous jokes and innuendoes. A few of these, much like the ‘three friends’ in Walker’s (1988) study, were able to gain some respect by meeting such taunts head-on and employing their flair and artistic talents in outlets such as school drama productions. Two boys who managed to do this in the early 1980s left school to become successful and entrepreneurial hairdressers in Newburyport. Most boys so labelled, however, adopted more passive strategies and generally tried to get by without drawing attention to themselves. Such students, unlike the responsible young men, were not regarded as potential Catholic leaders in the community. In Newburyport there is certainly a network of Catholic male ‘leaders’ and businessmen with strong links to CBC. The careers teacher, Bruce Smith, himself born in Newburyport and an old boy of the school, soon discovered that many school leavers got jobs because of old boys: ‘[Many old boys] are 38 or 40, just rising to the top of their jobs as executives; others are in their 50s now…so they just look after the old school tie’. The network reaches strongly into Newburyport’s banking and retail industries and more generally throughout the business community and the public life of the city. One prominent father, who during the period of the study became Newburyport’s mayor, expressed the kind of loyalty to the Brothers that is expected of old boys. He claimed, ‘One thing

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that I have always been proud of, and always will be proud of, is that I received a Christian Brothers’ education—and there’s no better education available’. He was thankful to the Brothers for ‘making me what I am today’. As a teacher explained, ‘Our parents have good contacts…very good contacts some of them’. Of course the parents being referred to here were fathers and the school used them to its advantage. For instance, the principal, Brother Carter, was shadowed as part of the research as he made use of the network when dealing with banks, insurance companies and building contractors to negotiate management of a substantial debt and make arrangements for renovating part of the school. Mothers were not called on in this way. Their contribution was usually in the form of rostered duties in the school canteen and contributions to fund raising activities like the annual ‘fashion parade’, which usually was attended by over two hundred mothers. The sense of competitiveness and aggression, that is so strongly associated by Brother Manion with the Brothers’ educational mission, sits rather uneasily with the emphasis at CBC and other Brothers’ schools upon devotion to the Blessed Virgin and the Holy Family. Devotion to Mary has played a major part in the faith of Catholics for centuries (Laeuchli, 1972) and has been especially prominent in Irish Catholicism. Although this tradition of Marian devotion has declined substantially since the Second Vatican Council, a statue of Mary Immaculate stood on an elevated altar in each classroom at CBC and served as the predominant female image in the school. To my mind these statues in some ways had a stronger ‘presence’ in the school than the marginalized women teachers who were present in life. Most Brothers and many lay teachers began each lesson with a ‘Hail Mary’ when students as a general rule faced towards the statues and bowed their heads. During the month of October, a time of special devotion to Mary in the Catholic Church, there was an emphasis on recitation of the Rosary and other prayers in supplication to or in honour of the Mother of God. At such times it was common for some classroom altars, especially in junior grades, to be decorated with more extravagent furbishments than the usual plastic flowers. It was also not unusual for the feast of the Immaculate Conception, March 25, to be a day on which boys in various classes received instruction about sex, manners and appropriate relationships with girls, and the mysteries of female biology. One devout and well-meaning woman, whose husband, brothers-inlaw, nephews and several sons have attended CBC, has conducted such sessions on a number of occasions. I did not witness these, but I have reproduced here an account of one session that was provided by a male teacher, Bob Murphy, who referred to the incident as ‘Brigid Fitzpatrick’s sex talk’: There was an audible hush as Brigid stepped up to the podium. Here was Everymum about to deliver the goods—with the nihil obstat and imprimatur of God, Mary, Saint Joseph and CBC. She was respectably groomed in a prim and proper Country Roadish way. To the boys she was Gospel; to anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of biology, she was humbug. ‘Now boys, there’s no reason to be uncomfortable about the subject. I have raised three boys so I have a good idea of what you know about girls. You know, girls are special creatures with special needs and special times. You may notice that women—even your mums—act differently at different times. During these times you must be especially careful not to upset them, because they’re feeling a bit under the weather. It’s natural and part of God’s plan. Just as you’ve changed, so have your mother and older sisters at different times in their life.’

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A quick glance around the room showed thirty-five quizzical stares. When would she get to the good part? ‘…and so, boys, remember to be open and honest with your parents, and show special care for your sisters and your mother. They are all special people who deserve your special care. Are there any questions?’ Not a hand went up, but it was the first sex talk that I’d ever heard which posed more questions than it answered. To a fifteen year old it must have been utterly baffling. To be fair to Mrs Fitzpatrick, I must emphasize that this is an individualistic account of such sessions. Others might have provided a different interpretation, although I doubt that there would be much disagreement about her general content and message. Brigid Fitzpatrick, along with a coterie of others, served as a generalized and unthreatening model of mature femininity in the life of the school—something like a fleshly and somewhat older-looking version of the plaster statues. She had a friendly but understated relationship with the school, had borne sons for the Church, was a devoted church-goer, took a leading role in organizing the duties of other mothers at the school (canteen service, fund-raising), invited the Brothers into her home, was welcome at the Brothers’ House, and appeared always calm, well-groomed and maternal. She could be described, in Sumner’s (1975) terms, as one of God’s police. I do not wish to belabour the significance of Mary, both virgin and mother, in the symbolic life of CBC. Even this brief sketch, however, indicates the type of cultural features that are associated with womanhood in the traditions of the school and in Catholicism. The symbol of Mary was pervasive yet unremarkable within the daily life of the school. Largely because it was unremarkable, indeed virtually redundant, Mary seemed to bond particular female stereotypes into a meaningful image of woman. That is, the symbol did more than stand for a particular idealized woman; it subtly constituted and communicated a powerful cultural notion of appropriate womanhood. I do not wish to suggest that the symbol of Mary exclusively defined ‘woman’ for CBC participants; such symbols give us the capacity to make meaning but that capacity is always ‘mediated by the idiosyncratic experience of the individual’ (Cohen, 1985:14). The ethnography shows that traditions were being challenged in various ways at CBC as alternative conceptions of woman were being constituted in practice. The challenge was being prompted largely by the increasing presence of women teachers in the school. Moreover, enough has been said to establish that the values associated with Mary in some ways were broadly consistent with images of hegemonic masculinity which pervaded CBC—traditional Roman Catholicism, compliant femininity, patriarchal family. These were emphasized as part of the ‘real’ world that boys would encounter. In other ways, however, Mary offers something of a counterpoint to this sense of the ‘real’ world. Holy Mary, virgin and mother, whose whole life was spent in obedience to God, was venerated in terms of a remote idealism. Of course, such an image has traditionally fitted well in an institution that, until recently, was virtually entirely run by men who were remote from women and had vowed to abstain from sex. The Catholic hierarchy has for centuries been based on the belief that chastity and celibacy are associated with a special ‘calling’ from God. Also within Catholicism, the view of Mary as the ‘new Eve’ has been associated with the fundamental belief that her son was crucified in order to redeem all of us from what was essentially Eve’s original sin (Laeuchli, 1972; Malone, 1989). In the statues Mary is gentle, untouched and above the world as

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she accepts her fate with humility and quiet resignation. She indeed represents the ‘other’ in relation to the earthly, physical and competitive world of the football club and school. The combination of these rather rarified sites of male learning and masculinity construction had the effect, I believe, of reinforcing the sort of traditional masculine attitudes that are outlined by Arnot (1984): The traditional masculine values of taking as much pain as possible without giving in, being able to ‘hold’ alcohol, to show no feelings, to be competitive, is hardly likely to fit in with equal participation in parenthood, with valuing women and respecting an equality of the sexes… Boys learn to eschew the domestic and repress the emotional side of life…[T]hey have to try to achieve manhood through the dual process of distancing women and femininity from themselves and maintaining the hierarchy and social superiority of masculinity by devaluing the female world. In circumstances such as those that prevailed at CBC, boys were given little opportunity for socialization into roles other than those associated with dominant masculinity. One reformist male official in a Catholic Education Office said of schools like CBC: We are not even ready to address the question of boys’ schools and how they prepare young adolescents to become the next generation’s lovers and husbands and fathers. How do you develop [men] who will in fact be able to be generative and intimate? That is sort of beyond us. Entrenched gender-bound attitudes could therefore inhibit young men in the development of their full human, as opposed to masculine, potential. As Askew and Ross (1988:13) conclude about such a situation, ‘This is very important because it often results not only in damage to the boys themselves, but can be even more destructive to the people they interact with and their relationship with the environment’. The emphasis on the gentle and motherly Virgin at CBC can be contrasted also with the tradition of discipline at the school that has led to an institutionalized concern for order, obedience and control. Discipline and Authority The Christian Brothers in Australia have a well-earned reputation for maintaining strict discipline in their schools (Morris, 1945; Radic, 1972; Blair, 1976). Former pupils often recall the familiar leather strap that was used to enforce a rigid code of classroom behaviour and to punish both recalcitrance and poor scholarship. Instances of classroom dread and summary justice can seem funny in retrospect even if terrifying at the time, as illustrated by a prominent Australian ‘product’ of the Brothers: Say Christianity to the Asian and he’ll think of Western imperialism; say it to the old [Christian Brothers] boy and he’ll recall May altars, three Hail Marys and the baptism of leather. For ten years we lived in constant threat of it… The meaning of Extreme Unction. The gerund, the dative case, simultaneous equations. ‘You don’t know, boy? Hold out your hand

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and take it like a man’. One day, even God rebelled. When the foolhardy Gunson ventured —‘but surely, sir, a mixed marriage isn’t always evil?’ Brother Conroy blackened, stamped his foot hard, the floor trembled, and the picture of the handsome Christ above the blackboard fell down on his head (Oakley, 1967:14). Discipline and physical punishment were associated with manliness and ‘character’, and miscreants could regain esteem and respect in the eyes of the Brothers by accepting punishment in the right spirit—‘by taking it like a man’. The blatant use of corporal punishment as a matter of course has declined markedly, however, during the past twenty years or so, at least at CBC, according to a teacher who was once a pupil there: In the years I was here as a student, there were a lot more Brothers here and the discipline was a lot harder than it is now. There was corporal punishment …just done very easily and without a second thought. I think a lot of parents knew that and actually expected that to happen if anything went wrong with their son. They expected the Brothers to belt them and put them straight. Another old boy sketched some details of classroom life in the late 1960s. He recalled that part of parental expectations, then and now, was that the Brothers would not only ‘straighten them out’ but also ‘toughen them up’: When I was here I remember being scared stiff—at times petrified. You wouldn’t move… Sometimes you would be too scared to ask questions—for example, you get four maths sums wrong and, bang, you are up for four straps. The once-familiar volley of leather was rarely heard at CBC by the mid-1980s, however. CBC participants generally explained the demise, but by no means the eradication, of corporal punishment in the school as being due to the decline in the number and proportion of Brothers on the teaching staff. Since the late 1960s, when almost all teachers at most Brothers’ schools were Brothers, their presence at CBC had declined to a mere 20 per cent of the total teaching staff by the mid-1980s. The remainder were lay teachers and, increasingly in the years of my research at CBC, a minority of women were appointed. Although the nature of discipline and punishment had changed considerably during the previous two decades, a concern with controlling student behaviour was still a feature of everyday life at the school. A senior Brother, for instance, had definite views about what the place of discipline should be: There are certain traditions that we have had. We have traditionally been regarded at our school as being authoritarian. Personally, I wouldn’t regard that criticism as much too worry about. I would be a little disappointed if some people did not regard our school system as authoritarian, because in my mind that would mean a lack of discipline.

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Other Brothers, particularly older ones, agreed with such sentiments and felt that the imposition and maintenance of a strict regime of discipline was an important part of the Brothers’ mission. The connection was explained by Brother Gordon: Interviewer: You seem to think that a high standard of discipline is an essential starting point. Brother Gordon: Yes, for a Catholic school. I truly believe that no person can be a Catholic unless he has got self-discipline. Interviewer: Could you elaborate a little on that? Brother Gordon: I am convinced [that]…one of the reasons why there is a fall off in faith, particularly amongst youth, is that they have not got sufficient discipline to be Catholics. You wouldn’t expect them to understand about discipline because their whole lives have been so easy…They have never had to exercise real self-discipline, to face up to the self-discipline of Christian life. While not all shared such a Pauline view of the necessity of Christian discipline, many teachers, religious and lay, believed that the strict discipline that was still associated with CBC had enhanced the reputation of the school. One teacher, for instance, whose association with the Christian Brothers and with Newburyport spanned over forty years, claimed that: Catholic people would send their boys to CBC because they are hoping for a good Catholic education. That is one thing. Then the second part that attracts people to CBC is, ‘I will send them to the Brothers and they will straighten them out’. While all teachers were expected to play their part in maintaining discipline, Bob Murphy, one of the school’s most highly regarded lay teachers, explained that the pressure on Brothers to conform to an authoritarian image was stronger than that on lay teachers because ‘the Brothers are perceived differently by the boys just because of the fact that they are a Brother’. The mould had been set by generations of Brothers and was, in general, maintained by the group at CBC. Indeed, teachers strongly agreed that parents shared an expectation that they would ‘straighten out’ any waywardness amongst their pupils. Not all of the Brothers, however, were happy about conforming to an authoritarian stereotype. Brother Ernest, for example, was critical of his confreres whom, he argued, had relied on engendering fear in pupils as a means of gaining and sustaining discipline. He maintained that the legacy of that style of teaching made it virtually impossible for him as a Brother to develop a ‘relationship of trust’ with pupils because so many older Brothers had ‘so successfully put forward the brutal image’ that pupils ‘don’t take [him] seriously’ when he tried to elicit their trust and cooperation. Brother Ernest’s position of passive opposition to entrenched expectations is very significant because it suggests very clearly that the masculine ethos of CBC was in no way uniform or uncontradictory. There was a problematic mix of ‘masculinities’ that were not simply structurally or organizationally determined. This point is illustrated also by the position of CBCs notorious ‘Brother Bash’. This Brother did not shirk from the role of authority figure but used physical education periods in an attempt, unsuccessful as it turned out, to balance his authoritarian image: I know I am criticized for teaching PE [but] that is the only way that I can meet every kid every week in that area… That is the thing. Even if I forget their names I can talk to them, like in the

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gym or in the swimming pool, because other times I have got to go in as the strong authority figure. The principal, Brother Carter, unlike Brother Ernest, had no doubts about the central place of discipline in the school: ‘In all my years of experience I have never seen a class working well that was not disciplined… A teacher is not suitable if he has not got discipline’. In such pronouncements, and in interviews, Brother Carter habitually referred to teachers as ‘men’. The statement above was made at a staff meeting and was accompanied by a reference to ‘a weakness in some classes’— meaning, of course, a weakness in some teachers. Such pronouncements were general enough to make most teachers feel somewhat uneasy. The emphasis on discipline seemed to lead some of them, particularly inexperienced lay teachers, to try to imitate the teaching style that was associated with the Brothers. Les Cameron, an experienced lay teacher, felt that such imitation was rarely successful: The trouble is that some teachers feel that extraordinary pressure to control their classes. And so we find that young teachers, particularly, are trying to impose a degree of control or this regimentation which is really beyond them. They might be trying to conduct the class the way that Brother So-and-so, who has been a teacher for many years and…has the children sitting up straight in rows—trying to run the class the way a teacher like that would. It is not their style and personality, and for some teachers this may exacerbate the problem rather than solve it. Some teachers were nervous because of the perceived pressure to control pupils. Yet some felt that student discipline had to change to cater for the changing needs of students. According to Heather Verdun: Traditions are there on one hand, and the expectation of discipline but, on the other hand, a lot of teachers realize that those demands aren’t realistic—that today, especially, you have to be able to communicate with the kids. And I think children’s expectations are different—they expect their teachers to be human and they want to be able to talk to them. There was no doubt in my mind that Brother Carter’s declared expectation that classes be quiet and orderly, along with a general expectation that was part of what was expected in a Christian Brothers school, deterred many teachers from adopting more liberal teacher-pupil relations. The principal set the tone of discipline and watchful control each school morning as he patrolled the school grounds before classes began. In the evenings he was almost always again on duty at the school gate seeing that pupils left the school grounds in an orderly manner. His attention to checking that correct school uniform was worn earned him the nickname of ‘mother’, a term which was not intended to flatter. Such constant vigilance by Brother Carter was cited as evidence by one teacher to support her conclusion that an institutionalized attitude towards pupils existed at CBC which smacked of McGregor’s (1960) theory ‘X’: The school is based more on—if you do the right thing you are okay; do the wrong thing and you get a punishment… The basis of this school is on the negative rather than the positive’.

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It is perhaps significant that, of the teachers who favoured more ‘positive’ authority relationships, many (but not all) were women. As I have emphasized however, for much of its history CBC was an all-male institution—the Brothers taught the boys. Lay teachers were increasingly employed from the late 1960s and, while most of these had been men, a small number of women had also been appointed, especially to the primary and junior secondary areas. Bob Murphy dispassionately summed up the status hierarchy of this mix of teachers at CBC: I think that when a Brother goes into a classroom on day one, they would have an added advantage over a [lay] male who goes into the classroom on day one who would have an advantage over a female who goes in on day one in an all boys’ setting. That is just what I have found here. A young woman teacher, from her perspective, put the situation more directly and urgently: ‘Most of the teachers have been males…but just now there seems to be this influx of females and [the boys] seem to be revolting against it’. Other women teaching in the secondary school agreed with the view that, as one calmly expressed it, They are finding it hard to accept us’. The response of male teachers to the perceived ‘discipline problems’ of their female colleagues was variable. One was rather sceptical about the existence of any general resistance towards women teachers: I never found that. I mean I have never noticed that. There have been odd instances of boys who have resented having a female teacher. This is the sort of thing that you hear from the female teachers not from the boys them-selves…that they seem to virtually object to the fact that they are being told what to do by a woman. I think that has got a lot to do with the home environment more than anything else, or how the father behaves, or even just a general view that people have of women perhaps. Some men attempted to assist their female colleagues by sharing ideas and strategies; others were only remotely sympathetic. Some were critical of the increased presence of women because, they claimed, classes too often had to be ‘settled down’ after lessons with women teachers who had inadequate classroom control. Only a few saw the treatment of women at CBC as fitting into broader social patterns of gender subjectivity. Robert Darling, for instance, perceived that… Women at CBC suffer somewhat from an unfortunate attitude which I believe exists in the minds of many of the boys and puts them at a disadvantage because they are women. This in turn suggests something about…the formation of those attitudes, or the reinforcement of those attitudes, by staff and perhaps by the Brothers themselves, or maybe by parental attitudes. Evidence from Robert’s classroom indicated that patriarchal attitudes were deeply held: Recently I gave the class the task of arguing why the male should be the head of the family… A lot of them took the line that…the notion of being head was one of issuing instructions or

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directions and…women are insufficiently capable of exerting their authority… Therefore the tasks they perform at home are the ones they are best suited to. The issue of authority was significant at CBC and the masculine undercurrent of pupil discipline was a feature that caused concern for a number of women. Heather Verdun, for instance, the first woman to teach an HSC subject at CBC, explained why she had to devise methods of classroom control that differed from the norm: Last year myself and Lynda were the first lady teachers that they had in the senior school—so that was a bit of a cultural shock for them… I suppose they find my style a lot different from the men—I don’t try and intimidate them physically or anything whereas some of the men might have. They might not say it but I guess it is always there—the blokes are bigger than they are and they could thump them. But, you know, I had to sort of rely on other things to get them to do what I wanted. Heather recognized the underlying hint of physically violent repercussions for miscreants that remained at CBC despite the relatively infrequent use of the strap and other versions of corporal punishment. But displays of physical violence did sometimes occur and were sufficient to keep alive the possibility that was ‘always there’, that pupils might get ‘thumped’. When such displays were performed in public with the rituals of theatre, the impact upon all pupils was maximized. At an assembly of years 7 and 8 students in the gymnasium, for instance, a number of boys who had committed various offences were lined up and strapped by Brother Stirling. Feelings amongst teachers about the strappings were mixed. According to one, a man: ‘It was great. The kids were all shitting themselves. Stirling was saying, “So-and-so, you did such-and-such three weeks ago. Come out here!” Bang, bang. All of them were wondering if they were going to be next’ Most disapproval came from the group of women who taught years 7 and 8. However, their disapproval was not so much of the strapping itself as of being asked to leave the scence of public humiliation before the strapping could proceed. All of them were furious at being singled out in a way which emphasized the stereotypical division of male toughness and physicality and female delicateness and sensibility. The incident also indicated women’s lack of belonging in the male domain of the school, and marked them out as not real teachers. Although adding to Brother Stirling’s theatre, the exclusion of female teachers reinforced the notion that women are weak. One woman complained, ‘I’ve seen pigs slaughtered so I am hardly going to get upset seeing a few boys get the strap’. Although the obvious competence and versatility in difficult circumstances of women like Heather Verdun and others made a mockery of stereotypical images of ineffectual femininity, women teachers remained on the fringe of a predominantly male culture. This culture was characterized, perhaps more than anything else, by the emphasis on forms of discipline. Several women believed that the latent violence that remained submerged for much, even most, of the time ‘undermines our authority and our discipline’. The use of corporal punishment, although infrequent, was the steel that reinforced the cement of the school’s gender regime. That sort of discipline was seen as effective yet was effectively denied to women. As one young woman put it:

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I wouldn’t be able to discipline in that way because they wouldn’t take me realistically that way anyway. Supposedly, the authority is meant to be there but, you know, I sort of don’t have it in the way that a male teacher would have it. Several points need to be made about the undertone of violence that was associated with discipline and authority at CBC. The first is that it was associated with male teachers, and with long-standing masculine traditions and expectations that women teachers would have difficulty sharing in even if they wanted to. Secondly, although during the period of study few men used obvious, physical violence at the school, the relationship of all male teachers with their pupils was influenced by it. This was usually to their advantage, in that classroom control became less problematic. However, some teachers, like Brother Ernest, felt that they suffered from expectations about discipline that impeded the development of greater intimacy between teacher and students. All women teachers, however, were adversely affected by the presence of violence in the immediate context of CBC. The possibility of violence as a back-up to teacher authority, even if it was distant and sporadic, marginalized women while reinforcing hegemonic masculinity. Thirdly, such possibility helped to reinforce among CBC participants, particularly students, the acceptance of the view that certain forms of violence are a legitimate and natural part of the adult world. Although instances of violence at CBC may be regarded as random, isolated phenomena associated with idiosyncratic individuals such as ‘Brother Bash’, I have attempted to illustrate that, as some women teachers had recognized, it was part of the fabric of the school—of its gender regime. This has parallels with the level of society more broadly. As Walby (1989:224) explains, ‘Men use violence as a form of power over women. Not all men actively need to use this potential power for it to have an impact on most women’. In an essentially male institution like CBC, life could be hard for females—a point made by a male teacher who, like myself in thinking about my own secondary schooling, wondered about the effect that the masculine culture of CBC may have had on him as a former pupil: As far as the women go it is hard to be objective because I think I have been conditioned because of my previous experience here at CBC… The Brothers here were always fairly strict and you couldn’t get away with much—but with the women you seem to be able to get away with a lot more. I think it is good that we do have more women here because I think it helps with the maturing process of the kids. Being around just boys and not having female teachers—as we did then—may have given us a warped type of view towards women and how you should treat them and all the rest of it. I think it is good that there are women on the staff now but, gee, it’s a rough road to have to come in on. Another former pupil, now also a teacher at CBC, described the situation this way: One of the biggest changes that I have noticed [about CBC] is the number of women on the staff and that has only been really in the last few years… I think the boys really need—I know I did—they need some sort of relationship with someone of the opposite sex, whether it was a teacher or whether it was, you know, anybody. I think we have got a lot of examples in year 11 and 12 where for the first time boys are coming up face-to-face with a female teacher. They

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don’t know how to cope. There are different points of view and whatever, but I think that in the lower forms there should be a few female staff, but unfortunately we are at the moment a bit down in female staff at the lower area and they are finding trouble and the boys …react a little bit to the female as being a bit of an easy option. Maria Campagna, who was having a particularly rough time, was a young first year teacher. I witnessed a number of incidents where she was subjected to emotional and sexual harrassment by members of her year 8 classes. In discussions that I conducted with groups of students, they often depicted her as almost childlike. One class group, during a discussion about curriculum, discipline and evaluation, claimed that ‘we shape the teacher’ and that they could make her cry whenever they wanted to. They often set out to do this. In concluding the conversation, a number of boys suggested in paternalistic tones that ‘she’ll probably be all right next year’. They expected her to improve as a teacher because her experiences with them would teach her about ways to control a class. For her part, Maria was not seeking excuses. Her appraisal of her situation was as follows: Being first year out adds to the problem. You know, I am sure that if I had been in my forties and came here they might have accepted me more readily. Well, if I had have been a male I would have probably had it a little bit easier—but I am not saying that it is just because I am a female that I am having, you know, that they are not listening or whatever, because it happens to everyone. But the male has just that little more authority. Maria had been employed partly as a teacher of Italian and had been surprised to find that there were few boys of Italian origin in her classes: Interviewer: Is there any way that you can use parents with Italian? Maria Campagna: Well, there aren’t many [Italian parents]. I was thinking of that. I was hoping there would be, but I would say there are only about two boys in each class of Italian parents… At Loreto Hall [nearby Catholic girls’ school] there is a fairly large population of Italians and other ethnic cultures. Interviewer: What do you think happens to the boys? Maria Campagna: I thought most of them would be here but they are not. The simple answer to the mystery of what happened to the Italian boys is that they were restricted from entry to CBC because of a zoning requirement. The majority of Italian and other immigrant families lived in the less affluent Northern suburbs of Newburyport and were zoned to another Catholic secondary school, Vianney College, in that area. Thus Maria was unable to make use of any cultural affinity she may have had with a group of Italian background. Far from believing that her performance as a teacher was likely to improve as a result of her experiences with boys at CBC, Maria feared that the reverse was happening: Maria Campagna: I think Bernadette may have had the same type of thing. Maybe she doesn’t say it as much but I think she’s depressed because of the fact that she can’t, you know, perhaps put her ideas into use. And with Christine, too, the girl that takes religion with me…

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Interviewer:

So that in fact you find yourself being pushed towards a much more authoritarian… Maria Campagna: Yes, I do and I don’t really like it because I can’t see the learning going on as well as it would be in another situation. I mean, I am there and most of the time I am lecturing or, I mean, I can hardly smile in the classroom because, if I do, that is the note that ‘oh fine, you know, we can have fun’. Maria provided an example of a situation that I had not witnessed but which illustrated some of her difficulties: The other day we were doing drama…and one boy got up and he imitated me so well it was incredible and I thought, ‘Now, what am I going to do in this situation?’ I mean, he was just like, ‘I am just tired of you’ and all this, and he said something about ‘I don’t want to teach you little brats’. I mean, I don’t say that but he sort of put that in. And I usually put a line up on the board and I sort of put ‘Br O’Hara’ on that and boys [whose names are put on the board] are going to be referred to him. He [the pupil] sort of walked up to the blackboard and he looks at everyone and he glares and looks—and I try and avoid putting names up on the blackboard and so I walk to the blackboard and fix the line up—and he was doing this and I thought, ‘Is this what I look like in the classroom?’ And I sort of laughed there and sort of accepted it and I thought, ‘Oh well’, and they went wild and they were just laughing and they went hysterical and I had to sort of put my foot down and say, ‘Right! You have had your fun’. One of Maria’s colleagues was less reluctant than her to fall back on the traditional authority of the Brothers: If I find one person is really rude or something like that, I take him to Brother Stirling—that puts the fear of God into them—or I bring them up to Brother Carter… It makes them better, but it is not really my authority. It is not me that is doing it. Certainly, pupils are aware that teachers cannot win by sending miscreants to the principal. As a student pointed out in referring to yet another woman teacher: If the teacher is a bit slack you do what you like. Like, one teacher is a bit slack with us. She’s got a soft voice and she can’t really tell us off. Brother Carter came in and said to send anyone who mucks around to him. But she doesn’t send anyone over because then they’d think she was a weak teacher. Although women like Heather Verdun were challenging the gender regime that was a major element of the organizational culture of CBC, attitudes like these made their task difficult. The general emphasis on control and discipline, and especially the actual or implied use of physical punishment, even if tacit and not officially endorsed, undermined the status of women.

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A Brothers’ School The gender regime of CBC had a number of identifiable features that contributed to its organizational culture. Many of these features had become institutionalized as part of what I have called elsewhere (Angus, 1988) ‘the Brothers’ school paradigm’. The concept of an organization as a paradigm is taken from Brown (1978:373–4): By paradigm we refer to those sets of assumptions, usually implicit, about what sorts of things make up the world, how they act, how they hang together, and how they may be known… [The] tacit intersubjective property of paradigms constitutes in effect the ‘agreement’ between members that enables the orderly production of role enactment. That is, the structuring of organizational interaction requires members to rely upon shared but largely tacit background knowledge that is embodied in an organizational paradigm. Roles as well as the definition of ‘problems’, ‘responsible opinion’, ‘leadership’, and so on, are afforded by the dominant model. I would now regard the notion of paradigm as somewhat too limiting in its lack of a strong sense of the possibilities of alternative (or counter-paradigmatic) actions on the part of organizational members, or of ways in which organizational structures are continually produced and reconstructed through the situated practices of organizational members. Nonetheless, the term is useful in highlighting the point that a number of characteristics of CBC were clearly recognized by teachers, Brothers and lay, as expected and established elements. Amongst these was the expectation that Brothers would be firmly in control of the school. The fact that less than 20 per cent of the teaching staff at CBC were Brothers needs to be reiterated and emphasized—for their influence on the school was far greater than that proportion suggests. Indeed, one lay teacher, who had been recently appointed, was most surprised when this figure was pointed out to him: Terry Irving: I hadn’t realized that, you know. It just shocked me… Of course it’s true, but I hadn’t noticed that. Interviewer: Is that because their influence is so strong in the school anyway? Terry Irving: I think that they still have a firm grip on it, put it that way… You must remember also that the chapel and the very structure of the place…are constant reminders, constant symbols that exist. The obvious presence of the minority of Brothers was reinforced by the fact that, in terms of ownership and administration, as well as the traditions and expectations that have become a part of it, CBC was still very much ‘a Brothers’ school’. Because it was a Catholic school and the Brothers were members of a religious Order, they had a measure of moral authority. The dominant group in the school, then, were all men—single, celibate, clerical men. Brothers wore a form of clerical dress and lived in the Brothers’ House on campus. They usually spent their preparation and correction time there rather than with the lay teachers. The Brothers’ minority control gave them an administrative as well as a moral status advantage over lay teachers. This authority was reinforced because some lay teachers previously had been Brothers, and many had been pupils at Christian Brothers’ schools. Virtually all administrative positions in the secondary school were held by the few

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available Brothers, which is perhaps not surprising since the handbook for lay teachers in Christian Brothers’ schools in the mid-1980s stated firmly that: It must be clearly understood by applicants for positions in the schools administered by the Christian Brothers that the senior administrative positions will always be filled by Brothers, and that major policy will be framed by the congregation. All staff members, however, will have a voice at staff meetings regarding the general organisation and school policy. The principal at the time of the study, Brother Carter, had actually consolidated the minority control of the Brothers by shifting back coordination positions, formerly held by lay staff, to religious. One Brother described this move by saying, ‘It did strike me as if we were trying to tighten up the ship’. While some lay teachers had gained a large degree of informal influence at CBC, many relied upon the Brothers for leadership. This can be explained partly by the pervasive nature of the Brothers’ ‘presence’, partly by the reputation that the Christian Brothers had gained as practical men of action, and partly by the fact that most of the lay teachers who might have been considered for positions of authority within the school were men, usually former Brothers, who themselves had been educated by the Christian Brothers at CBC or other schools—in several cases by Brothers who were now their colleagues on the CBC staff. The most prominent of these men in the administration of the school were all ex-Brothers. The level of control that the headmaster and the Order had over the school was reflected by the fact that staffroom discussion about improving the school centred on criticisms of the headmaster, or of the Brothers’ Order and its Council, or of expectations and hopes regarding the incoming headmaster. As a former Brother and experienced teacher with some sixteen years’ service at CBC put it, ‘The administration of the school is one man and that is the headmaster. For better or worse we have that. What his priorities are—that will be what will happen’. Many teachers seemed to accept this view even if they were not happy about it. According to Heather Verdun, for instance, some lay teachers resented their lack of influence: It is all very well to ask people to be dedicated and to give you extra duties to do—and then cut you off from any say in the place. If you try and do anything they just cut you off at the ankles… And when someone like Jim Karn stands up at meetings and tries to say something about some of the problems in the place, some of them look at him as if it’s blasphemy. When talking with the Brothers and others at CBC, one soon became aware of legends of ‘great men’ who have been principals of Brothers’ schools—tireless, dedicated and inspiring leaders who have followed in the footsteps of the Irish founder of the Order, Brother Edmund Rice. One thing that the stories of legendary Brothers of the past had in common, apart from being tales of extreme dedication to the Brothers’ mission, was that they described leaders whose control over their institutions was absolute: Brother Stirling: In the olden days people were put in charge of schools because…they were a good strong boss in the Community [of Brothers] and this made them a good headmaster. Interviewer: The language you used then—‘a good strong boss’?

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Brother Stirling: Well, everybody would line up at the same time and the same place and all the minute things would be done. Interviewer: There is a lot of priority on control and so on? Brother Stirling: There was a lot. When any non-Brothers, even old boys and ex-Brothers, had trouble attaining senior or even middle positions in the school hierarchy, it is no surprise that women were not to be found in those positions. The lack of visibility of women, however, was more marked than merely an absence from leadership positions. Women teachers were unlikely to fit into the traditions and fabric of the school in the way that men, especially old boys, could. Men, even if they had no past association with Brothers schools, were usually more willing and able to join in the male sports emphasis of the staffroom. And even if they disapproved of the nature and degree of the masculine discipline regime, they were more inclined than the women teachers to join in the male banter and codes that accompanied it. Men were also sufficiently socialized into a general male culture to enable them to fit into the informal social networks which had developed over time within the predominantly male membership of CBC. Women were likely to be marginalized in all of these aspects of the school culture and to feel somewhat like outsiders in a curious male domain. I have attempted to provide some insights into the nature of this male domain through reference to various practices and incidents within CBC. Many other incidents, some mundane, others more unusual but equally significant, could be cited in building a more detailed and coherent composite of CBC’s gender relations and gender messages. I shall summarize without comment just a few of the incidents that are recorded in the field notes. These are not randomly chosen, nor do I claim that they are typical of routine events at CBC. Rather, they are a selection of events which seem to me to be evocative of CBC’s gender regime: • During my first week at CBC I attended an inservice day for teachers who were ‘new to Christian Brothers schools’. One of speakers was a woman who, unusually in such schools, had been teacher of senior students for many years in a Brothers school. On numerous occasions she referred to the Brothers as ‘manly men’. • Roy Zanardo, head groundsman at CBC, prepared the cricket pitch for the staff-student cricket match. Roy was a fast bowler. He made sure that the pitch was green and slightly damp to suit his bowling. The toss was rigged so that the staff would win it. They sent the students in to bat, and to face Roy’s bowling, on the dangerous pitch. Despite Roy’s bag of wickets, the students won. • A group of year 10 students were gathered around a classroom door waiting for the teacher to open it. Jim Karn came past and, grinning widely, hurled himself into the group throwing several off balance. One large boy regained balance and advanced on Jim with fake menace. Jim shaped up in a mock boxing stance and threw a couple of wide but hard punches. The boy retreated, still smiling but with a somewhat cowed expression. • I congratulated Brother Stirling on the performance of his gymnastics team in the recent state championships. ‘If you kick them hard enough they’ll win often enough’, he joked. • A boy, who was regarded by some of his peers as a ‘bit of a girl’, insisted to me that he had managed to gain an apprenticeship at the General Motors Holden plant and would soon be leaving CBC. Almost immediately afterwards, the boy’s father told me in a discussion at his

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workplace that his son was indeed to leave school, but that the apprenticeship he was going to take up was with a local hairdresser. Heather Verdun stormed into the staff workroom complaining about what she regarded as an unsatisfactory response from the principal about a particular matter. She stormed out again in a rush to get to her next class. Two male teachers looked knowingly at each other. ‘On the rags again’, said one. David Welsh, a former Brother and the longest-serving teacher at the school, complained to me that ‘sometimes I don’t think I’m on the staff at all’. He believed that he had been marginalized by his male colleagues because he would not ‘go for a drink’ with them on Friday evenings after school. During the year 11 social a number of boys indicated that they had arranged a ‘party’ in the form of a late night drinking session in a nearby park. Next day at school, there was much lurid discussion of events at the party. Three women teachers had been trying for some time to establish some form of visual and performing arts program in the curriculum but had encountered a number of problems, often related to the noise made during classes. They were teaching in an older part of the school that was in poor condition and scheduled for renovation. Once the works began they did not know what would happen to the program. In a free-form drama class conducted by one of the women mentioned above, the ‘wife’ was all bum and boobs and the ‘husband’ dominant and authoritarian. When it became known amongst staff that a young female teacher of Italian was to be appointed, several men wondered what she would look like. Someone volunteered the information that the woman was a cousin of a year 12 student, Charlie Montini. ‘Christ’, said one man, ‘I hope she’s better looking than Charlie’.

With masculine forms so much taken for granted, the gender regime appeared as nothing more than common sense. This led to uncertainty amongst women, about matters that are usually straightforward, because they were continuously made aware by the gender regime of their ‘difference’. For instance, one very experienced woman teacher felt uneasy when she came to CBC because of ‘little things like what to wear… What can you wear? I was checking out all the other females to see what they were wearing’. Women were therefore disadvantaged in learning the underlying rules that might help them to fit in. Even when such matters as dress codes were resolved, women teachers could still face difficulties in relation to the most influential of their colleagues, the Brothers. Cameron Pont, a former Brother and long serving teacher, tried to explain tactfully the general character of relationships between Brothers and women teachers: Interviewer:

Do you think gender and the fact that it is a single sex school makes a great deal of difference? Cameron Pont: I think it makes a difference that the Christian Brothers just won’t accept girls into their schools. That is quite contrary to their policies. Interviewer: But they accept them as staff. Cameron Pont: They accept them as staff, that is right (pause). Yes, that is true, they accept female staff (pause). I think that they believe though that they are dealing on a professional basis and they can keep them at arm’s length and they don’t have to be involved. In

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fact you will find, I think, that you have some of them here now that they would tell you that some of their conversations with women and so on have to be at arm’s length and so on, and not to become involved. That again is part of the tradition. Although, regrettably now, I did not pursue this matter with individual Brothers, several women teachers volunteered that they felt that Brothers gererally maintained an ‘arm’s length’ approach to them, and confirmed that they found the Brothers rather remote and difficult to talk with. This suggests that, even if these women performed well in the terms defined by the Brothers, ex-Brothers and other males, because they were not a part of the mainstream informal networks, they were unlikely to be noticed for advancement. Such informal networks, as Adkinson (1981) points out, are a means by which patronage works. Nor were women at CBC as likely as men to receive informal feedback about what was going on around the place or looming as significant issues. That sort of information comes from membership of networks. Relying on formal communication channels, or on their own network which was marginalized, it is likely that it was very difficult for the women at CBC to become ‘insiders’ and so infiltrate either the formal or informal power coalitions. Conclusion The gender code that is reflected in the gender regime of CBC is largely internalized in complex ways, although not without contestation and contradiction, by members of the CBC community. However, at the same times as they internalize it, they also contribute to it or attempt to alter it in various ways. For pupils, learning essential features of the gender code could be regarded as an element of the hidden curriculum. Such an interpretation is favoured by Acker (1988:310) who suggests that ‘analysis of gender regimes, gender codes or hidden curricula does not result so readily in blaming the teacher…for the school processes appear hegemonic enough to carry along teachers in their wake’. Such a realization seems important. The approach I have taken in this chapter is to attempt to go beyond merely identifying the sexist practices of some men by locating instances of gender discrimination and formation within a broader institutional context which clearly requires transformation. At the same time, however, the realization that sexist practices may be ‘rooted in tradition and common sense rather than malice’ (Acker, 1988:310) should not in my view be used to absolve men and hegemonic masculinity from responsibility for oppression. As it is men in general who benefit from this oppression, it could be argued, as Askew and Ross (1988:13) do, that it is male teachers, especially, who should take responsibility for helping boys (and, I would add, girls) by offering them an alternative to the hegemonic model of masculinity. The problem with this worthy ideal is that male teachers, certainly many of those at CBC, may be reluctant to change their behaviour and may see no point in, or reason for, changing their masculine attitudes. Maleness works within the organizational culture. Indeed, as the ethnography has illustrated, to some extent boys and men at CBC blame women for what could be seen as the result of their own (i.e. male) sexist practices—especially in the area of classroom discipline. Many of the problems encountered by women teachers seemed to have emerged directly from the norms of the general male authority structure. Some instances of classroom disruption grew from incidents that could be described as sexual harrassment. In the world of the school, it seems, women are likely to

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be regarded as incompetent by some men if they are not able to control students in an authoritarian manner. At the time the study concluded, the principal, Brother Carter, clearly dominated decision making in a way that was consistent with the general ethos of the school. His views and actions seemed to be pervaded by an entrenched and somewhat romanticized notion of ‘a Brothers’ school’. The traditional, masculine, clerical values largely entrenched in the life world of the Christian Brothers Order were by and large represented as the values of the school as a whole. These values and corresponding entrenched expectations, or social and cultural rules, were shared to varying degrees by Brothers, former Brothers, other lay teachers, parents, students and others associated with the school. Women (and others) at CBC may resist and refuse to accept its prevailing rules. The level of resistance was likely to depend largely upon the extent to which they recognized and resented their position of disadvantage in the organizational culture. The presence of a growing number of women in the school, and the consequent opportunity for a degree of female solidarity, may well see increased challenges to the dominant values and interests that have been engrained into the school’s structure. In the past, these had been largely taken for granted as legitimate so that, in the predominantly male and masculine institution, instances of sexual discrimination and harrassment, as well as a largely unproblematic, entrenched phallocentricism, could remain unseen because they appeared normal and ‘natural’ within the prevailing order. The presence of women and men who are prepared to subject to scrutiny such values and interests means that issues of gender and ‘alternative conceptions of interest may have to be taken account of; that is, they may get on the agenda and motivate new patterns of action’ (Walsh et al, 1981:139). This point emphasizes the importance of understanding the structure of school culture and gender regime as other than an inpenetrable monolith. These multifaceted and internally complex notions must therefore be considered as existing within, and contributing to, competing values and discourses. While the potential for action by women and men to counter the established gender regime clearly can be seen from this study, the position of those women teachers who might be expected to instigate anti-sexist action must be understood in relation to the prevailing gender regime which leaves them marginalized. The autonomous actions that were taken by some of these women are therefore all the more significant given their structurally relatively powerless position in terms of their access to cultural resources within the institutional framework. Something similar could be said about the many teachers, religious and lay, who felt constrained in multiple ways by their sense of the ‘Brothers’ school paradigm’ and the traditions of the school. Such reification partly explains the manner in which even teachers with reformist ideas held to the hope that Brother Carter’s replacement as principal would be ‘a curriculum man’. Then curriculum issues, an area of particular but not exclusive concern to several women teachers, would be put on the agenda from above rather than asserted from below. This is not to say, however, that women at CBC, despite their structural position, passively accepted their lot. The ethnography indicates the reverse. As Apple (1986:77) makes the point more generally: …women are active, not passive, figures in attempting to create positions for women as teachers based on their own positions in the social and sexual division of labor. These efforts

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may have had contradictory results, but they were part of a much larger movement…to challenge aspects of patriarchal relations. Leading the challenge against coercive, physical, individualist, masculine traditions of competition and enforcement of control and discipline at CBC were several competent and articulate women teachers. Their resistance to oppressive forms of discipline was based largely upon the realization that the actual and threatened use of physical punishment in a routine manner by many male teachers entrenched patriarchal authority while simultaneously reinforcing a view of women as ‘soft’ and ineffectual. But the resistance also reflected a broader challenge to authoritarian and hierarchical control. The women, and some male colleagues such as Brother Ernest, who opposed the physical intimidation of pupils had attempted in their own classes to develop humane personal relationships with students, to encourage them to express their own personal identities and values, and to use these as a basis for the discovery of self and for encouraging social interaction in collaborative ways. Several women also attempted to encourage and support each other both in the development of curriculum and in the encouragement of cooperative relationships among teachers and pupils based on mutual respect. These strategies, while they may be correctly interpreted as forms of resistance on the part of some women against patriarchal and hierarchical authority, may also be seen as an attempt by them to contribute to a non-bureaucratic form of organizing. In this project, they drew not upon predominant patriarchal values but largely upon women’s traditional experience in order to challenge the bureaucratic separation of the public from the personal life in institutional contexts. Ferguson (1984) points out that, largely because of the particular roles that traditionally have been available to them both in the family and in public spheres, the experience of women, including their encounter with organizations, is structured in a way that is different from that of men. Of particular significance here is the conflict that is encountered by many women in attempting to reconcile their position of working within both the public and private spheres. Ferguson argues, moreover, that while women have been victims…they [also] have been actors, creators, builders of objects and of relations, confined, certainly, to a limited private realm but nonetheless immersed in a world that possesses some of its own positive merits and is more than a reaction to exclusion from the public world of men (Ferguson, 1984:23). Such a perspective helps explain why it is that a number of women at CBC asserted in their work practices many of the person-oriented values that are often associated stereotypically with women’s traditional role. In doing so they attempted to mediate masculine and bureaucratic domination by fostering a collectivist, cooperative orientation in classrooms and in professional relationships. Of course, this should not be taken to indicate that women’s traditional role as caregiver and subordinate should be glorified; or that particular characteristics of women’s or men’s experiences should be regarded as given. These are culturally produced. The point to be emphasized is that, as Ferguson succinctly states, ‘women will not be liberated by becoming “like men”’ (1984:94). Nor are women particularly empowered in organizations which offer them ‘equal opportunities’ to be like men. Reforms which purport to give women access to positions of power, and to treat women

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equally with men, often arise from a situation of masculine hegemony in which women are seen as ‘the problem’. In such situations, as Marshall (1986:208) puts it, ‘men are not making sufficient accommodation in their roles to complement women’s development’. Significantly, although women at CBC did not usually discuss with me their struggles in terms of women’s liberation or feminism, many of them nonetheless made it clear that they refused to try to prove themselves in masculine terms. To varying degrees, they resisted subordination to men and accommodation to patriarchal values. However, an important element of the struggle of these women was that, quite clearly, it occurred on a terrain that had been historically established as a site of patriarchal relations. This point was strongly reinforced by the manner in which boys were by and large socialized into a broadly masculinized culture. Moreover, although I have not developed the point in this chapter, it is important to emphasize that there are differences among and within women (or men) as a cultural group, and also within any particular group of women (or men) (Scott, 1988). At CBC such differences were manifest within, for instance, different attitudes of women to, and experiences of, feminism, teaching as a career, and the combination of career and domestic work. An example of profound differences amongst men was in the respective attitudes towards discipline of Brother Stirling and Brother Ernest. The point here would seem to be not so much to search for any ‘authentic feminine practice’ but to examine the effectiveness of women’s action in achieving change, first of all, within specific contexts, and then in working to widen the options of women’s lives in male-dominated society. Such change will require changes on the part of men as much as, if not more than women. In that long term-project, it is important to recognize that the positing of distinctions between a private or domestic (largely feminine) sphere and a public (masculine) sphere in earlier versions of feminist theorizing may actually contribute to ‘the dualisms common in Western thought as part of the ideological processes that constitute women as other and subordinate’ (Acker, 1989:239). From this perspective, and drawing on the recent work of Moi (1985), Felski (1989:219) is critical of ‘womencentred’ or ‘gynocritical versions of feminism (for example, Rich, 1977; Griffin, 1984; Gilligan, 1982) which, based on a notion of universal female consciousness and experience, aim to unite women despite their different circumstances. Felski (1989:219) argues: The truth of female experience is perceived to provide an adequate balance for the development of an oppositional women’s culture, with little attention to the ways in which the notion of a female reality is itself mediated by ideological and discursive systems which are neither innocent nor transparent, and which feminist theorists may not wish unreflectingly to accept. Recent attempts to ground a feminist ethics, epistemology, aesthetics, etc, in an appeal to a unifying substratum of female experience merely reiterate existing ideologies of gender, differing only on privileging the feminine pole, and remain trapped within an inherently limited model of dualistic thought. The clear implication is that such privileging of the feminine pole of an arbitrary dualism amounts to a virtual accommodation of women’s historical confinement to the private, feminine sphere which has been a major cause of their marginalization and disempowerment.

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In the short term, however, it seems unlikely that women will be agents for social and cultural change within institutions such as CBC unless they draw upon social and cultural values that are deeply held. In the confrontation with the gender regime of CBC, this would suggest that attempts to recognize, and to authenticate as appropriate within the organizational culture, traditionally ‘feminine’ values and characteristics would constitute genuinely transformative work (cf. Hyde, 1989). These might include such notions as caring, an emphasis on the personal and the relational, and on emotions. Such concepts, it can be argued, should be central in the teaching practice of both women and men. The symbol of Mary, the virgin mother, and the rituals associated with her, potentially could be made problematic and ‘reritualized’ to serve a liberatory purpose for women, and ultimately men and boys, within CBC (cf. Malone, 1989). For this to happen, symbols and rituals ‘must offer a space for critical reflection and promote the development of a new social imagination grounded in an ethic of freedom and social justice, beginning with the construction of a political will capable of surmounting those forces that oppress the powerless’ (McLaren, 1989:55). Such a process would require ‘liberating rituals to make possible the reconstruction of asymmetrical relations of power that often result from rituals which do not admit the capacity for critical selfreflexivity’ (McLaren, 1989:55). At the very least, an attempt to counter hegemonic views, which currently tend to dismiss such values as inappropriate in organizational life, might help to confirm for women a sense of agency within institutional structures. In this sense, women at CBC, as in many other institutions, would be seen as social actors, many of whom lived with the day-to-day tension of both attempting to reconcile the conflict of working in both public and private spheres, and also of finding ways to oppose and reconstruct the conditions to which, to a greater or lesser extent, they largely conformed (cf. Wescott, 1979). The objective of the larger women’s struggle, in which women at CBC play a part, is presumably the elimination of patriarchy and forms of male oppression. It seems essential to such a struggle that conceptions of women’s history and women’s culture, and interpretations of women’s experiences, be both affirmed and, at the same time, problematized. A sense of gender solidarity then may be emphasized, and yet the emancipatory possibilities of such solidarity and women’s identity need not be undermined by their association with women’s traditional roles and duties. That is, women in sites like CBC might encourage the recognition and validation of, but not mere acceptance of and contentment with, women’s traditional perspectives. Indeed, the scrutiny of such perspectives might be grounded in the experiences of the women’s lives at CBC and could lead to critical appraisal of options for action. Such examination might encourage the identification of individual and shared problems and the linking of these with institutional and social factors. Some of the common concerns of women identified in this chapter—the construction of particular forms of masculinity amongst CBC pupils, the prevailing imagery and understanding of women within the organization, the nature of and emphasis on discipline in the school, and the hierarchical nature of its organization —might serve as a focus for such scrutiny. In such a way, the rendering problematic by women of their experience at CBC, and of their location within its organizational culture, may serve as a necessary but not sufficient condition for generating an attempt to bring about organizational change and greater gender equality.

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Notes 1 Pseudonyms are used throughout the chapter for the sake of anonymity. I should mention however that, almost without exception, teachers, students and members of the CBC community were remarkably open and helpful in the conduct of the research. The principal, ‘Brother Carter’, was especially supportive. I am extremely grateful to them. 2 As part of the research, I was joined for an intense period of data collection for a period of six weeks by Louis Smith, Richard Bates and Peter Watkins (see papers in Angus, 1986). I acknowledge their assistance and take full responsibility for the way in which their contributions have been employed in this chapter. Others who offered helpful comments on earlier drafts of the chapter include Nina Bruni, Bob Connell, Alan Rice, Shirley Sampson and Terri Seddon. 3 The Congregation of Christian Brothers is a religious order founded in Ireland in the late eighteenth century by Edmund Ignatius Rice. It is largely modelled on, but should not be confused with, the much older French order of Frères des Ecoles Chrétiens founded by De La Salle. Members of this older order also are known as Christian Brothers in some parts of the world, and as De La Salle Brothers in Australia.

References ACKER, J. (1989) ‘The problem with patriarchy’, Sociology, 23, 2, pp. 235–40. ACKER, S. (1988) ‘Teachers, gender and resistance’, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 9, 3, pp. 307– 22. ADKINSON, J. (1981) ‘Women in school administration: a review of the research’, Review of Education Research, 51, 3, pp. 311–33. ALDRICH, H. (1988) ‘Paradigm warriors: Donaldson versus the critics of organization theory’, Organization Studies, 9, 1, pp. 19–25. ANDERSON, G. (1989) ‘Critical ethnography in education: origins, current status, and new directions’, Review of Education Research, 59, 3, pp. 249–70. ANGUS, L. (1982) ‘Definitions of unacceptable pupils: the case of the “Sweathogs”’, Unicorn, 8, 2, pp. 267– 72. ANGUS, L. (1984) ‘Student attitudes to teachers and teaching’, Unicorn, 10, 2, pp. 240–50. ANGUS, L. (1986) Class, Culture and Curriculum: A Study of Continuity and Change in a Catholic School, Geelong, Deakin University Press. ANGUS, L. (1987) ‘A critical ethnography of continuity and change in a Catholic school’, in MACPHERSON, R. (Ed.) Ways and Meanings of Research in Educational Administration, Armidale, University of New England Press. ANGUS, L. (1988) Continuity and Change in Catholic Schooling: An Ethnography of a Christian Brothers College in Australian Society, London, Falmer Press. ANGUS, L. (1989) ‘“New” leadership and the possibility of educational reform’, in SMYTH, J. (Ed.) Critical Perspectives on Educational Leadership, London, Falmer Press. APPLE, M. (1986) Teachers and Texts: A Political Economy of Class and Gender Relations in Education, New York, Routledge and Kegan Paul. ARNOT, M. (1984) ‘How shall we educate our sons?’, in DEEM, R. (Ed.) Co-education Reconsidered, London, Oxford University Press. ASKEW, S., and Ross, C. (1988) Boys Don’t Cry: Boys and Sexism in Education, Milton Keynes, Open University Press. BARRETT, M. (1980) Women’s Oppression Today, London, Verso.

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KESSLER, S., ASHENDEN, D., CONNELL, R., and DOWSETT, G. (1985) ‘Gender relations in secondary schooling’, Sociology of Schooling, 58, 1, pp. 34–48. LAEUCHLI, S. (1972) Power and Sexaulity: The Emergence of Canon Law at the Synod of Elvira, Philadelphia, Temple University Press. LEDER, G. (1980) ‘Bright girls, mathematics and fear of success’, Educational Studies in Mathematics, 11, pp. 411–22. MACDONALD, M. (1980) ‘Socio-cultural reproduction and women’s education’, in DEEM, R. (Ed.) Schooling for Women’s Work, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul. MCGREGOR, D. (1960) The Human Side of Enterprise, New York, MCGraw-Hill. MCLAREN, P. (1989) Review of LESKO, N., Symbolizing Society: Stories, Rites and Structure in a Catholic High School, Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 20, 1, pp. 51–6. MALONE, M. (1989) ‘Mary, Mother of God: an educational problem?’, British Journal of Religious Education, 12, 1, pp. 15–19. MANION, C. (1977) Editorial, Christian Brothers Studies, 50, 2, pp. vii–x. MARSHALL, J. (1986) Women as Managers: Travellers in a Male World, Chichester, John Wiley and Sons. MATTHEWS, J. (1984) Good and Bad Women: The Historical Construction of Femininity in Twentieth Century Australia, Sydney, George Allen and Unwin. MEEK, V.L. (1988) ‘Organizational culture: origins and weaknesses’, Organization Studies, 9, 4, pp. 453–73. MILLS, A. (1988) ‘Organization, gender and culture’, Organization Studies, 9, 3, pp. 352–69. Moi, T. (1985) Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory, London, Methuen. MORGAN, G. (1980) ‘Paradigms, metaphors and puzzle-solving in organization theory’, Administrative Science Quarterly, 25, pp. 605–22. MORRIS, J. (1945) The Moon in My Pocket, Sydney, Australasian Publishing. OAKLEY, B. (1967) ‘Years of sawdust, the crack of the whip’, Secondary Teacher, February. OUCHI, W. (1981) Theory Z, Reading, Mass., Addison-Wesley. RADIC, L. (1972) ‘Why do I choose a Catholic school?’, in GILL, P. (Ed.) Catholic Education: Where is it going? Melbourne, Cassell. RICH, A. (1977) Of Women Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, London, Virago. RILEY, P. (1983) ‘A structurationist account of political culture’, Administrative Science Quarterly, 28, pp. 414–37. SAMPSON, S. (1987) ‘Equal opportunity, alone, is not enough or why there are more male principals in schools these days’, Australian Journal of Education, 31, 1, 27–42. SCOTT, J. (1988) ‘Deconstructing equality-versus-difference: or, the uses of post-structuralist theory for feminism’, Feminist Studies, 14, 1, pp. 33–50. SHAKESHAFT, C. (1986) Women in Educational Administration, Newbury Park, Ca., Sage. SILVERMAN, D. (1970) The Theory of Organisations, London, Heinemann. SMIRCICH, L. (1983) ‘Studying organisations as cultures’, in MORGAN, G. (Ed.) Beyond Method, London, Sage. SPENDER, D. (1982) Invisible Women: The Schooling Scandal, London, Writers and Readers. SPENDER, D., and SARAH, E. (Eds) (1980) Learning to Lose: Sexism in Education, London, The Women’s Press. SUMNER, A. (1975) Damned Whores and God’s Police: The Colonisation of Women in Australia, Ringwood, Vic., Penguin. SWINGEWOOD, A. (1975) Marx and Modern Social Theory, London, MacMillan. WALBY, S. (1989) ‘Theorizing patriarchy’, Sociology, 23, 2, pp. 23–50. WALKER, J. (1988) Louts and Legends: Male Youth Culture in an Inner-City School, Sydney, Allen and Unwin. WALSH, K., HININGS, B., GREENWOOD, R., and RANSOM, S. (1981) ‘Power and advantage in organizations’, Organization Studies, 2, 2, pp. 131–52.

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4 Cool Guys, Swots and Wimps: The Interplay of Masculinity and Education Robert Connell

Introduction Schools have often been seen as masculinity-making devices. Dr Arnold saw his renovated Rugby as a means of forming a Christian gentleman. Other reformers in the years since have given other schools the task of forming a sober and industrious working man, a technocratic competitor, and the New Soviet Man. Research in the 1970s and 80s inspired by a new agenda, that of feminism, suggests that Dr Arnold was right. Schools do not simply adapt to a natural masculinity among boys or femininity among girls. They are agents in the matter, constructing particular forms of gender and negotiating relations between them. Research and policy discussion in the 1970s (epitomized in the remarkable 1975 report of the Australian Schools Commission, Girls, Schools and Society) found conventional gender stereotypes spread blanket-like through textbooks, career counselling, teacher expectations and selection processes. This was theorized as the transmission of an oppressive or restrictive ‘sex role’ to girls. It followed that girls would be advantaged by modifying the sex role or even breaking out of it. This led easily to an educational strategy: a program of compensation and redress to expand girls’ occupational and intellectual horizons, affirm women’s worth, write women into the curriculum, and so on. Almost all this discussion was about girls and their restrictive ‘sex role’. By implication the boys were getting one too. But here the sex role approach does not translate smoothly into educational reform. Since men are the privileged sex in current gender arrangements, it is not obvious that boys will be advantaged by teachers’ efforts to change their ‘role’: on the contrary boys may resent and resist the attempt. A puzzled literature on the ‘male sex role’ in the 1970s (documented by Carrigan, Connell and Lee, 1985) scratched pretty hard to find ways by which men are disadvantaged or damaged by their sex role. No convincing educational program ever came of it. Teachers grappling with issues of masculinity for boys (see for instance the vivid account by Thompson, 1988) now seem to be reaching for concepts beyond that of ‘role’, and expecting to face a politicized and emotionally-charged situation. This is very much in accord with the development of research since the 1970s. Most intensive research techniques, and more sophisticated theories of gender, have found complexities and contradictions in the ‘stereotypes’, and have highlighted instead the institutional practices of gender which children encounter in schools. Thus Thorne (1986) shows how situational is the segregation of the sexes in US primary schools. Messner (1989) shows how the formal structure of organized

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sport in the United States provides a temporary resolution for developmental problems of masculinity. Kessler et al. (1985) point to the ways curricula and school organization in Australia separate out different kinds of femininity, and different kinds of masculinity, within the same school. Heward (1988) confirms this point in her analysis of the history of a British boys’ private school, and shows how strongly the school’s interactions with parents are organized around classspecific models of masculinity. It is clear that the ‘sex role’ model will not work; but as yet there is no widely accepted account of the process of gender formation to take its place. It is equally clear that the logic of compensatory programs has little relevance to the privileged sex. Educational work on gender with boys must take a different shape—but what that should be, no one is very clear. This paper is intended as a contribution to both issues. Unlike most discussions of the topic it is not based on research in schools. Research on schooling is usually confined to schooling, and thus has difficulty seeing where the school is located in a larger process. There are various ways of getting such a perspective. In this paper the perspective comes from the life-histories of adults, interviewed about their schooling in the context of a broader investigation of gender. The significance of the life history in the analysis of gender is explored at a theoretical level in Gender and Power (Connell, 1987), which shows how personality can be understood as an organization of socially structured practice. This conception was the basis of method in an exploration of contemporary changes in masculinity. Life-history research, especially when used for social analysis, is extremely time-consuming; to sample the general population would be prohibitively expensive. I reasoned that useful insights into current historical dynamics could be gained by selecting specific groups where change in the social construction of masculinity, if occurring at all, should be salient. Four groups were selected, of which two are discussed in this paper: (a) a group of young men from the un-respectable end of the working class, recently out of school, growing up in the face of structural unemployment and in the shadow of the prison system; (b) a group of men, mostly some years older and mostly from more affluent backgrounds, who are involved in ‘green’ politics, social action on environmental issues. In the study as a whole, thirtynine life histories were collected, in various parts of New South Wales, during 1985–87. Interviews covered family, workplace, sexual relationships, friendships and politics, in addition to schooling, as settings for the construction of masculinity. They were tape recorded and later transcribed. The analysis in this paper reflects the second stage of data analysis. In the first stage, a case study of a particular life is made on the basis of each interview. The framework for the case studies comes from the general analysis in Gender and Power of the structure of gender relations and the nature of the life-history, modified by the specifics of the case and the experience of the interviewee. At this stage interpretation is still mainly in the realm of social psychology, looking at social dynamics in the construction of the person. In the second stage the analysis is everted, so to speak, to look at the way personal projects are implicated in a collective or institutional process, and the analysis shifts to the realm of sociology. In another paper (Connell, 1989b) I have attempted to identify shared social ‘moments’ in the personal politics of masculinity for the six men involved in environmental politics. This paper studies the interplay between personal trajectories and the institutional process of mass schooling. It provides striking evidence of how diverse that interplay can be. Life-history research is not identical with ethnography, though many ethnographers collect life histories and even use them as their primary source material. The tendency in classical ethnography

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is to de-historicize the life, to take the events or occasions of a personal history as exemplars of a cultural pattern. In this study, as in Johnston and White’s study of activists in the Disadvantaged Schools Program, the emphasis is on historical process, on transformation, both in personal life and in institutions. Through such a focus I would hope research using the model of the ‘theorized life history’ may help move educational ethnography past the somewhat static view of culture it has often conveyed. Getting Into Trouble Down behind Mal Walton’s high school is the bush—the school was built during the postwar suburban explosion—and at the edge of the bush are the school toilets. This is where Mal and his friends would gather: In high school [my friends] were real hoods too. Like we used to hang down the back…we’d sit down there and smoke cigarettes and talk about women, get dirty books out, going through —what do you call it? I can’t think of the word. Just the things you do at high school in the first year. Mal had been placed in the bottom stream, and was evidently regarded by most of his teachers (though not all) as disruptive. The main reason he was in the bottom stream was that he could not read. He was arrested for theft at 15, in the year he left school, and has not had a lasting job in the six years since. Harry the Eel (so called because of his fanatical devotion to the Parramatta football team, ‘the Eels’), now 20 and about to become a father for the second time, used to practice his school smoking in the same fragrant setting: I was in a bit of trouble in the last four years of school. I got busted for—what was it? Second Form it was selling porno books. Third Form it was getting drunk at the school fete, and allegedly holding another bloke down and pouring Scotch down his throat—which we didn’t do, he was hassling us for drink… They found him drunk and they said ‘Where did you get it?’ and he mentioned our names and biff!…straight into it… Fourth Form, wasn’t much happening in Fourth Form really, busted in the dunnies having a smoke! Eel started an apprenticeship but his employer went broke and no one else would take over his training. Since then he has been on the dole, with casual jobs from time to time, and a sideline dealing drugs to finance his motorbike. Eel hasn’t been arrested, but his mate Jack Harley has. Jack is less of a tactician, and fought every authority figure from his parents on. He thinks he was labelled a ‘troublemaker’ at school because of an older cousin. He clashed early and often with teachers: They bring me down, I’ll bring them down.’ He was expelled from at least one school, disrupting his learning—‘I never did any good at school’. Eventually he assaulted a teacher. The court ‘took the teacher’s word more than they took mine’, and gave him a sentence in a juvenile detention centre. Here he learnt the techniques of

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burglary and car theft. About three years later he was doing 6 months in the big people’s prison. At 22 he is on the dole, looking for a job to support his 1-year-old child and his killer bull terrier. These three young men come from labouring families, in Mal Walton’s case from a very poor family, and their experience of school shows the relationship between the working class and education at its most alienating. What they meet in the school is an authority structure: quite specifically, the state and its powers of coercion. They are compelled to be at school, and once there—in their own view— they are ordered about arbitrarily by the teachers. The school is a relatively soft part of the state, but behind it stands the ‘hard’ machinery of police, courts and prisons. Push the school too far and, like Jack Harley, one triggers an intervention by the enforcers. Up against an authority structure, acts of resistance or defiance mean ‘getting into trouble’. This is one of Jack Harley’s commonest phrases, and indicates how his actions are constantly defined in relation to institutional power. Fights with other boys, arguments with teachers, theft, poor learning, conflicts with parents, are all essentially the same. One can try to retreat beyond the routine reach of institutional power, as Mal Walton and his friends did in their idyllic moments in the toilet block on the edge of the bush. Even there one will be ‘in trouble’ when the authorities raid the retreat, as they did to Eel. At the same time trouble has its attractions, and may be courted. Mal Walton, for instance, was caned a lot when he went to a Catholic primary school. So were his friends. In fact, he recalls, they fell into a competition to see who could get caned most, though no one would win: ‘We just had big red hands’. Why this competition? ‘Nothing to do; or probably proving that I was stronger than him or he was stronger than me’. A violent discipline system invites competition in machismo. More generally, the authority structure of the school becomes the antagonist against which one’s masculinity is cut. Jack Harley, in the comment on teachers quoted above, articulated an ethic of revenge which defines a masculine pride common in his milieu. But he lacked the judgment to keep it symbolic. Teachers often put up with verbal aggression as part of their jobs, but they are hardly likely to stand still when physically attacked. So the courting of trouble calls out an institutional response, which may push an adolescent assertion of masculine pride towards an early-adult criminal career. Trouble’ is both sexualized and gendered. Getting the ‘dirty books’ out and ‘talking about women’ are as essential a part of the peer group activity as smoking and complaining about teachers. In the mass high school system sexuality is both omnipresent and illicit; to act or talk sexually becomes a breach of order, a form of ‘trouble’, in itself. But at the same time it is a means of maintaining order, the order of patriarchy, via the subordination of women and the exaltation of one’s maleness. Patrick Vincent, currently on probation for car theft, succinctly explains why he liked being sent to a co-educational high school after being expelled from his boys-only church school: ‘Excellent, chicks everywhere, good perve’. He boasts that within a week all the girls in his class wanted to climb into his bed. The treatment of young women by these young men is often flatly exploitative.

Knowing Where You Stand To other boys, the hoods in the toilet may be objects of fear. Danny Taylor recalls his first year in an urban working-class high school. Despite being big for his age, he hated the physical contest:

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When the First Form joins and all comes together from all different [primary] schools, there’s this thing like sorting out who was the best fighter, who is the most toughest and aggressive boy in the form, and all the little mobs and cliques develop. So it’s like this pecking order stuff… and I was really frightened of this. He did not enjoy high school until Form IV (about age 16), when ‘all the bullies left’. This is not peculiar to urban schools. Stewart Hardy, the son of a labouring family in the dry, flat country in the far west of NSW, makes the usual contrast between city and country but paints the same kind of picture: In the country…as easier for us to get along with each other, although there was the usual dividing: the cool guys hang out together, and the cool girls hang out together, and there was the swots and the wimps… You knew where you stood, which group you belonged to. Stewart and Danny joined the wimps and the swots respectively. Both managed to use the education system to win social promotion (though in both cases limited) out of their class. The process of demarcating masculinities in secondary school has been noticed in ‘ethnographies’ of working-class schools in Britain (Hargreaves, 1967; Willis, 1977) and Australia (Walker, 1988). Willis’ vivid picture of the ‘lads’ and the ‘ear’oles’ is justly celebrated. Such demarcation is not confined to working-class schools. We have seen a very similar sorting in a ruling-class private school, between the ‘bloods’ (hearty, sporting) and the ‘Cyrils’ (wimpish, academic) (Kessler et al., 1985; Connell, 1985). This suggests a typology of masculinities, even a marketplace of masculinities. To ‘know where you stand’, in Stewart Hardy’s phrase, seems to mean choosing a masculinity, the way one might choose a football team (the Eels) to barrack for. It is indeed important to recognize that differing masculinities are being produced. But to picture this as a marketplace, a free choice of gender styles, would be misleading. These ‘choices’ are strongly structured by relations of power. In each of the cases mentioned, the differentiation of masculinities occurs in relation to a school curriculum which organizes knowledge hierarchically, and sorts students into an academic hierarchy. By institutionalizing academic failure via competitive grading and streaming, the school forces differentiation on the boys. But masculinity is organized— on the macro scale—around social power. Social power in terms of access to higher education, entry to professions, command of communication, is being delivered by the school system to boys who are academic ‘successes’. The reaction of the ‘failed’ is likely to be a claim to other sources of power, even other definitions of masculinity. Sporting prowess, physical aggression, sexual conquest, may do. Indeed, the reaction is often so strong that masculinity as such is claimed for the cool guys, with boys who follow an academic path being defined as effeminate (‘the Cyrils’). When this situation is reached there is a contest for hegemony between rival versions of masculinity. The school, though it has set this up, may be highly ambivalent about the outcome. Many school administrations actively seek competitive sporting success as a source of prestige. The First Fifteen, or the school’s swimming champion (e.g. the ‘Iron Man’ in Connell, 1989a), may attract as much honour and indulgence from the staff as the academic Dux.

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The differentiation of masculinities, then, is not simply a question of individual difference emerging of individuals’ paths being chosen. It is a collective process, something that happens at the level of the institution and in the organization of peer group relationships. Indeed the relationship of any one boy to the differentiation of masculinities may change over time. Stewart Hardy remembers being terrified on his arrival at high school (and even before, with ‘horror tales’ about high school circulating in his primary class). He and his friends responded by ‘clinging to each other for security’ in a wimpish huddle in Form I. But then: Once I started getting used to the place and not so afraid of my own shadow, I felt here was my chance to develop a new identity. Now I can be a coolie, I can be tough. So I started to be a bit more belligerent. I started to get in with the gangs a bit, slag off teachers behind their backs, and tell dirty jokes and stuff like that. But it didn’t last. After a while, as Stewart got older, ‘I decided all that stuff was quite boring. It didn’t really appeal to me, being a little shit any more, it didn’t really suit my personality’. This was not just a matter of Stewart’s ‘personality’. His parents and his teachers put on more pressure for academic performance as the School Certificate (Form IV) approached. Indeed his parents obliged him to stay on at school to Form VI, long after the ‘gangs’ had left. Over the Hump The labour market in modern capitalist economies is segmented and stratified in a number of dimensions. Perhaps the most powerful division in it is not any longer the blue-collar/white-collar divide, but the distinction between (a) a broad market for more or less unskilled general labour— whether manual or clerical—and (b) a set of credentialled labour markets for specific trades, semiprofessions and professions. The public education system, as the main supplier of credentials (certificates, diplomas, degrees), is deeply implicated in this division. When Stewart Hardy’s working-class parents ignored his protests and made him stay on in high school, they were pursuing a family strategy to get him over the hump between these two labour markets, and into the world of credentialled labour. For Stewart it was a rocky path. He resented the pressure, slacked off at school, got involved with a girlfriend, and did ‘miserably’ at the Higher School Certificate. Soon after that he ditched the girlfriend and got religion. But after he had been a while in the workforce, his parents’ pressure bore fruit and he took himself to a technical college to have a second try at the HSC. This time he did so well that he qualified for university. He is now (aged 24) doing a part-time Arts degree, and at the same time a computer training program organized by his employer, a big bank. He doesn’t see computing as a career, but as a fallback: ‘If things get tight I can always go back to being a programmer, because there are always jobs for that’. He may get into a career through his degree. Stewart has got the message about qualifications, with a vengeance: … the time I wasted before, I could have been at university getting a degree. Seven years out of school and I have absolutely no qualification at all. All I did was bum around and take whatever jobs camp up…

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The contrast with Mal Walton, Jack Harley and Patrick Vincent is stark: they are glad of ‘whatever jobs come up’, and expect to be at the mercy of such economic chances as far as they can see into the future. To them it isn’t ‘time wasted’, it is life. Through the mechanism of educational credentials, Stewart Hardy has bought into a different construction of masculinity, in which the notion of a long-term career is central. A calculative attitude is taken towards one’s own life; a passive and subordinated position in training programs is accepted in order to provide future protection from economic fluctuations. The life-course is projected as if up a slope, with periods of achievement distinguished from plateaux of wasted time. The central themes of masculinity here are rationality and responsibility rather than pride and aggressiveness. Young men from more privileged class backgrounds are here, so to speak, from the start. Their families’ collective practice is likely to be organized around credentials and careers from before they were born. For instance I come from a family whose men have been in the professions—engineering, the church, medicine, education, law—for several generations, and it never occurred to me that I would not go to university in my turn. In such a milieu the practice of credentialling does not even require active consent, merely the non-occurrence of a refusal. As Bill Lindeman, son of an administrator and an academic researcher, put it—getting a little bogged in his multiple negatives— Because I’d had three siblings who’d gone ahead of me, so there was that sort of assumption there, that the opportunity was given to me to not question it, to not go to something else. And I didn’t have strong interests: the strongest interest I had was surfing, in the Sixth Form. And there was nothing really to motivate me to go off and do anything else. So I went to uni. Here, very visibly, is a life-course being constructed collectively and institutionally, i.e. through the education system and families’ relationships to it. Of course the young person has to do such things as sit in class and write exam answers: there is a personal practice involved. But to a marked degree it is a passive practice, following an external logic. The person’s project is simply to become complicit in the functioning of an institutional system and the privileges it delivers. There is a painful contrast with the personal investment, and cost, involved in the hoods’ doomed assaults on the same institutional system. One begins to feel the reason in all that anger. Dry Sciences What privileged young men find at the end of the educational conveyor-belt is not necessarily to their taste. Bill Lindeman went to university because there was nothing motivating him to go elsewhere, but after he had been there—and I hope it pleases his teachers—he began to think. When I chose science I chose zoology. My sister and my brother had done exactly the same and my other brother was doing physics, so we were all doing science. There was a strong analytical bent there. I chose life science because—that stemmed from my earlier childhood, enjoying natural places. It wasn’t till I’d left uni that I realized I was so bored with ninety-nine point nine percent of it. I just wasn’t finding nature in laboratories, cutting up rats and dogfish. The vitality and change that you can learn from nature just isn’t there. It was dry. I didn’t relate it to the living world.

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Bill’s critique of the abstractness, the un-life-likeness of biology is a familiar theme in critiques of other disciplines and of academic knowledge in general (e.g. Lafitte, 1957; Johnson, 1968; Rich, 1979). Bill’s version is informed by his ‘green’ politics. He began to resolve the problem in a research project involving long field trips to the Snowy Mountains, and then became deeply committed to environmental activism. In that context he also became concerned with the re-making of masculinity (see Connell, 1989b), though he has not specifically linked this theme back to his academic experience. There is, nevertheless, a connection. The dry sciences of academic abstraction are a particular institutionalization of masculinity. Masculinity shapes education, as well as education forming masculinity. So much has become clear from explorations of the history of natural science inspired by feminism over the last ten years (cf. Harding, 1986; Keller, 1984). It is not, as some of the pioneering work in this vein implied, a question of maleness in general; the argument would hardly apply to the relation of men to nature in central Australian aboriginal society. It is a culturally specific version of masculinity, indeed a class-specific version. Contrast the hot, loud, messy masculinity of the ‘hoods’. Even within one class, as the case of the Bloods vs. the Cyrils shows, it is not the only version of masculinity. Yet it is an important, even crucially important, form in the contemporary world. Winter and Robert (1980) some time ago noted the importance of the changing scale and structure of the capitalist economy for the dynamics of masculinity—a theme much ignored by ‘men’s studies’ literature since. The dry sciences are connected on the one hand to administration, whose importance is obvious in a world of enormous state apparatuses and multinational corporations. On the other hand they are connected to professionalism, which is a synthesis of knowledge, power and economic privilege central to both the application of developing technologies and the social administration of modern mass populations. In both respects they are connected to power. But this is not the crude assertion of personal force that is all the power a young man like Jack Harley can mobilize. Rather it is the organized, collective power embodied in large institutions like companies, the state, and property markets, the power which delivers economic and cultural advantage to the relatively small number of people who can operate this machinery. A man who can command this power has no need for riding leathers and engine noise to assert masculinity. His masculinity is asserted and amplified on an immensely greater scale by the society itself. Reading Feminism The men in the study who are involved in counter-sexist politics, or who have at least adopted some feminist principles, have almost all read feminist books. Indeed some say this is their main source of feminist ideas, alongside personal relationships with feminist women. In contrast, mass media seem to be the main source of information about feminism among men who have not moved towards feminism. Contemporary feminism, at least self-identified feminism, is a highly literate political movement. The mobilization of the ‘second wave’ was accompanied by a vast outpouring of writing: new books, new magazines, special issues of old journals, and so on. Students and teachers made up a high proportion of activists. Writers like Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, Mary Daly occupy a

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central place in modern feminism, and the conflict of texts is central to the definition of its various f actions and currents. To become a feminist does not absolutely require a higher degree in literature, but it is certainly usual that someone becoming a feminist will read a lot. Many people cannot read. This is true absolutely for Mal Walton, whose alienation from school is described above; he was tipped out into the labour market at 15 unable to read a job advertisement. He is desperately disadvantaged by illiteracy, tries to conceal it from the employment service as well as from employers, and is currently asking his girlfriend to teach him to read. Illiteracy in first-world countries tends to be concentrated among poor and marginalized groups (see, e.g. Hunter and Harman, 1979). In a case like this it is easy to see its connection with ‘getting into trouble’, the war on school in which Mal’s embattled masculinity was shaped. More commonly in Australia young people do learn to read, in the sense that they can decode the letters and spell out the words, but do not put this skill to use for anything much beyond job advertisements and sports results. I think this is true for Eel and for Jack Harley; Patrick Vincent is in between, he can read reasonably but has difficulty writing. None of these young men ever mention ideas they have got from print, only those that come from talk and television. There is a level of political literacy where reading opens up new ideas, poses alternatives to existing reality, explains what forces are at work in the wider world. These young men have not entered this world, and are only likely to if there is a major politicization of the Australian working class and a massive adult education initiative. Since the mass communication system which they are plugged into, commercial television, is totally opposed to such a change, the strong likelihood is that they never will reach political literacy. The men who do grapple with the textual politics of feminism are likely to be from privileged class backgrounds, like Bill Lindeman, whose political literacy is an aspect of his easy insertion into higher education. Or they are men who, like Danny Taylor, have used the education system to escape a working-class milieu. In neither case is the reading likely to be uplifting and enjoyable. The literature they are most likely to encounter, the ‘public face’ of feminism as Segal (1987) puts it, is—not to put too fine a point on it—hostile to men and little inclined to make distinctions between groups of men. The reader is likely to encounter a lurid picture of men en bloc as rapists, batterers, pornographers, child abusers, militarists, exploiters—and women as victims. Titles like Female Sexual Slavery, Women of Ideas and What Men Have Done to Them, Pornography: Men Possessing Women, set the tone. Young men who read much of this literature and take it seriously seem to have one major reaction: severe feelings of guilt. Barry Ryan sums it up: ‘After university I was at the stage where I could understand academic literature, and I read some pretty heavy stuff, which made me feel terrible about being male for a long time’. Guilt is an emotion with social effects, but in this case they are likely to be disempowering rather than positive. A young man ‘feeling terrible about being male’ will not easily join with other men in social action, nor can he feel solidarity (except at some symbolic level) with women. Thus guilt implies that men’s personalities must change but undermines the social conditions for changing them, an enterprise which requires substantial interpersonal support. Nor is there any set of texts to turn to. In terms of what is widely available, there is little between popular feminism (which accuses men) and mass media (which ridicule feminism). A small literature of masculinity-therapy exists

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(e.g. Goldberg, 1987; Farrell, 1988) designed to assuage the guilt feelings of men affected by feminism; this is almost as demobilizing as the guilt itself. This is situation where an educational effort in schools and tertiary institutions might bear rich fruit. Courses on sexual politics do exist at both levels. But they are few, especially in schools. Barry Ryan is the only one of our respondents to describe a course of this kind, in a progressive private school: The teachers at that free school were the ones who decided to implement that sexism program and we [i.e. the students] were involved in it. I remember having to go and make a verbal submission… We got this course together. I remember having all-male groups and the women having all-women groups, and talking about sexism, and that was basically it. We did a lot of discussion about sexism and how we communicated about women. I didn’t learn that much in the course itself, it just taught me that it was something that I was going to have to think about. And so from then on I was always thinking about it. On Barry’s account the organizing framework is ‘sexism’, which would imply a focus on attitudes and perhaps a moralization of the issue. Two respondents described meeting feminist content in tertiary courses, though not as focused as Barry’s school course. Both had come back to education after a period in the workforce, with a project of personal change in mind; this may explain why they were in courses dealing with such issues. There is a marked sexual division of labor in Australian higher education. Material on sexual politics is rare in courses with high proportions of male students. Notes for Practice The picture of the part played by schooling in the formation of masculinity that emerges from these interviews, looking down the perspective of the life history, is more conflictual and more contradictory than the idea of the school as an agency of ‘sex role’ socialization. The school is not necessarily in harmony with other major ‘agencies’—the family, the workplace—and it is not necessarily in harmony with itself. Some masculinities are formed by battering against the school’s authority structure, others by smooth insertion into its academic pathways, others again by a tortuous negotiation of possibilities. Teachers’ characters and sexual politics are not brought into focus in these interviews, but they are no less complex than the sexual politics of the pupils (cf. teachers’ life histories in Connell, 1985), and are also important in shaping what happens in schools. There is some explicit educational treatment of masculinity in the experiences documented here, including the counter-sexist course described by Barry Ryan, and the influence of organized sport mentioned by many of the respondents (cf. Messner, 1989). On the whole, however, it is the inexplicit, indirect effects of the way schools work that stand out in the long perspective on masculinity formation. A stark case is the way streaming and ‘failure’ push groups of working-class boys towards alienation, and state authority provides them a perfect foil for the construction of a combative, dominance-focused masculinity. Equally clear is the role of the academic curriculum and

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its practices of selection in the institutionalization of a rationalized masculinity in professions and administration. To put it in more familiar language, the ‘hidden curriculum’ in sexual politics is more powerful than the explicit curriculum. This creates a dilemma for those concerned with democratizing gender relations in the schools. What the school acknowledges as its activity in relation to gender, and may therefore be willing to discuss under the heading of ‘equal opportunity’ or ‘anti-discrimination’, is less significant than what it does not acknowledge. A change of awareness, a bringing-effects-tolight, must happen before the full spectrum of the school’s influence can even be debated. The school is probably not the key influence in the formation of masculinity for most men. In most cases in the study I would judge the childhood family, the adult workplace, or sexual relationships (including marriage) more potent. Teachers need to bear this in mind: they are not dealing with issues in a social vacuum. Nevertheless schooling is the next most powerful influence across the board, and in some cases and some situations it is decisive. It may also be the most strategic, in the sense that the education system is the setting where an open debate about the democratization of gender relations is most likely to happen, and can gain some purchase on practice. It has already done so in relation to the education of girls; not in relation to the education of boys. There is no lack of interest in questions of sexuality, gender and sexual politics among boys and young men—as the topics of conversation in Mal Walton’s toilet block illustrate. For many it is a matter of absorbing concern. Yet at present the educational resources for responding to this interest are deployed in a way that makes them spectacularly difficult to use. Feminist textual politics are inaccessible to most men and require a teeth-gritting effort from the few who make contact. Courses on sexual politics are located mostly in higher education, which most men (like most women) do not reach; and in sectors of higher education programs not entered by most of the men who do become students. School-level equity programs concerned with gender are mostly targeted on girls, as might be expected given the ‘equal opportunity’ rationale. The first task, then, is simply to frame programs that do stand a chance of reaching large numbers of boys. Given the importance of the mainstream curriculum and selection process in the shaping of masculinities, it would be self-defeating to locate programs in an extracurricular slot such as ‘sex education’ (or its euphemisms, ‘personal development’ etc.). As Yates (1983) argues, those concerned with counter-sexist education must be concerned with mainstream curriculum and school organization. A new program should be an effort ‘across the curriculum’, much as language development is now conceived. Thus a school trying to examine and reflect on masculinity with its pupils will do so in relation to sport, in relation to science, in relation to art and literature, in relation to personal interaction in the peer group and between teachers and pupils, and in relation to the school’s own institutional practices (e.g. examining, streaming, administrative authority). The most difficult problem, the issue on which work in this area is now hung up, is a logical one: finding a rationale for curriculum design. A ‘compensatory’ logic will not work for the privileged sex. A ‘role reform’ logic is inadequate to the forces at work, as well as dubious in its goals. I don’t have a formula to offer in place of these, but would like to suggest two considerations for people thinking about the problem. First, a criterion of scope and social realism. The sources of information about sexuality and gender available to boys are often narrow and reactionary. It would seem an appropriate purpose for education to introduce its pupils to the whole truth about

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an important area of their lives: to gay sexuality as well as straight, to the range of gender patterns across the world, to issues of rape and domestic violence as well as happy families. To do this requires prioritizing the experiences of those who are usually silenced or marginalized, especially women. This is not likely to be easy to do with many adolescent boys, but it is at least a coherent educational goal and one that may call on motives of curiosity and sympathy to expand horizons. Second, it is important that work on issues of masculinity should be felt to be going somewhere, should find paths forward for the boys engaged in the enterprise. The life histories document a good many blocked paths, cases where the development of a patriarchal masculinity follows from a sense of being trapped, or where an attempt at reconstruction peters out in frustration, doubt or confusion. In my teaching on issues of gender at university level, I have often seen men starting out with goodwill; then, confronted with the endless facts of gender inequality, and feeling themselves under an incessant fire of blame, turning away because they had no method for dealing with this and saw nothing but more blame and guilt coming down the pipeline. Even with politically experienced men, finding a practical way to deal with issues of sexual politics is difficult, as the history of men’s consciousness-raising groups shows (e.g. Tolson, 1977). Some sense of agency, a sense of being able to accomplish something on these issues, is needed. Here I think cooperative work with feminist women is essential; and educators may get very useful cues from people working on problems about adult masculinity, such as counsellors working with battering husbands (e.g. Ptacek, 1988; Adams, 1988). This is a revised version of an article with the same title, that appeared in Oxford Review of Education, 15, 3. We, the Publisher, acknowledge that permission has been granted to reproduce this article. References ADAMS, D. (1988) ‘Treatment models of men who batter: a profeminist analysis’, in YLLÖ, K., and BOGARD, M. (Eds) Feminist Perspectives on Wife Abuse, Newbury Park, Sage, pp. 176–99. AUSTRALIAN SCHOOLS COMMISSION (1975) Girls, School and Society, Canberra, Australian Government Publishing Service. CARRIGAN, T., CONNELL, R.W., and LEE, J. (1985) ‘Toward a new sociology of masculinity’, Theory and Society, 14, 5, pp. 551–604. CONNELL, R.W. (1985) Teacher’s Work, Sydney, Allen & Unwin. CONNELL, R.W. (1987) Gender and Power, Cambridge, Polity. CONNELL, R.W. (1989a) ‘An iron man: the body and some contradictions of hegemonic masculinity’, in MESSNER, M., and SABO, D. (Eds) Critical Perspective on Sport, Patriarchy and Men (forthcoming). CONNELL, R.W. (1989b) ‘“A Whole New World”: remaking masculinity in the context of the environmental movement’ (under submission). FARRELL, W. (1988) Why Men Are the Way They Are, New York, Berkley. GOLDBERG, H. (1987) The Inner Male, New York, Signet. HARDING, S. (1986) The Science Question in Feminism, Ithica, Cornell University Press. HARGREAVES, D.H. (1976) Social Relations in a Secondary School, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul. HEWARD, C. (1988) Making a Man of Him, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul. HUNTER, C. St J., and HARMAN, D. (1979) Adult Illiteracy in the United States, New York, McGraw-Hill. KELLER, E. (1984) Reflections on Gender and Science, New Haven, Yale University Press.

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KESSLER, S., ASHENDEN, D., CONNELL, R., and DOWSETT, G. (1985) ‘Gender relations in Secondary Schooling’, Sociology of Education, 58, 1, pp. 34–48. JOHNSON, L. (Ed.) (1968) Free U, Sydney, Free University. LAFITTE, P. (1957) The Person in Psychology, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul. MESSNER, M. (1989) ‘Boyhood, organized sports, and the construction of masculinities’ (under submission). PTACEK, J. (1988) ‘Why do men batter their wives?’, in YLLÖ, K., and BOGRAD, M. (Eds) Feminist Perspectives on Wife Abuse, Newbury Park, Sage, pp. 133–57. RICH, A. (1979) On Lies, Secrets and Silence, New York, Norton. SEGAL, L. (1987) Is the Future Female? London, Virago. THOMPSON, C. (1988) ‘Education and masculinity’, in CARELLI, A.O. (Ed.) Sex Equity in Education, Springfield, Thomas, pp. 47–54. THORNE, B. (1986) ‘Girls and boys together…but mostly apart: gender arrangements in elementary schools’, in HARTUP, W.W., and RUBIN, Z. (Eds) Relationships and Development, Hillsdale, Erlbaum, pp. 167– 84. TOLSON, A. (1977) The Limits of Masculinity, London, Tavistock. WALKER, J. (1988) Louts and Legends, Sydney, Allen and Unwin. WILLIS, P. (1977) Learning to Labour, Farnborough, Saxon House. WINTER, M.F., and ROBERT, E.R. (1980) ‘Male dominance, late capitalism, and the growth of instrumental reason’, Berkeley Journal of Sociology, 24/25, pp. 249–80. YATES, L. (1983) ‘The theory and practice of counter-sexist education in schools’, Discourse, 3, 2, pp. 33–44.

Acknowledgments. My thanks to the men who were interviewed, both for their time and for their willingness to tackle difficult issues. Norm Radican and Pip Martin did most of the interviews; the project was funded by the Australian Research Grants Committee with supplementary grants from Macquarie University. My thinking on these issues has been particularly influenced by Gary Dowsett. I am also indebted to Lin Paskalis’ thinking about working-class girls and schooling.

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5 Inside the Disadvantaged Schools Program: The Politics of Practical Policy-making Vivian White and Kenneth Johnston

Introduction Since 1975, the Commonwealth government of Australia has combatted inequalities in education by means of the Disadvantaged Schools Program [DSP]. The Program allocates funds to both government and non-government schools serving the greatest concentration of children in poverty in both the government and non-government sectors. In 1988, the time of this study, a total of $41 million was distributed through the Program to a little over 1,400 schools containing around 420, 000 children. In order to obtain the additional funds, participating schools must analyze the educational needs of the school community, prepare submissions for specific projects, and demonstrate how the additional resources will meet certain general criteria. These are to provide more equal outcomes for students, make schooling more enjoyable and increase the interaction between the schools and their communities. In the light of this requirement for school level interaction and decision making, it is reasonable to expect that since 1975 the DSP would have had a considerable effect upon educational practice. The Program has in fact been reviewed and evaluated a number of times (Cassidy, 1978; Ruby et al., 1985). In general the reviews have drawn upon the opinions of senior administrators to make recommendations about policy and administration. The emphasis has been upon the formal structures that have been established to deliver the Program (guidelines, committees, coordinators, consultants, etc.) and on outcomes (greater teacher morale and student enjoyment, decreased truancy, improved learning outcomes, curriculum reform, etc.). These new structures and outcomes obviously imply quite dramatic change at the level of day to day school practice, but rarely is this explicitly analyzed in the reports. Our aim in this chapter is to fill this gap in our knowledge by documenting the collective experience of a group of key activists who have worked within the Program. In the first section we explain what we mean by ‘practice’ and describe the oral history material we have drawn upon in the research. The second section uses this material to illustrate how the Program has transformed educational practice. Our final section returns to questions of method in order to assess the value of oral history in policy oriented research.

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A: Oral History as a Mirror of Practice In ordinary usage ‘practice’ has a variety of meanings. It can refer to a sequence of behaviour that is habitual or customary or to systematic exercise to acquire a particular skill. This latter sense is sometimes used in education, as for example when teacher trainees spend time on ‘teaching practice’. We are also familiar with the usage whereby practice refers to the exercise of a profession or an occupation such as the practice of law or teaching. The core notion of activity or action that underlies these everyday usages is one that we wish to retain, but we want to develop a rather more specialized usage of the practice concept for our work. It is also common to find ‘practice’ being opposed to ‘theory’ as if the ideas and philosophy of the DSP are on one side of a divide and practical action on the other. This is to see practice as pure activity with no place for reflection. In contrast to this usage, we want to insist that educational activity necessarily combines reflection and action. The reflection may not take the form of ‘theory’ in its more specialized, scientific sense of systematic explanation. More frequently, practice may be justified by recourse to common-sense understandings of the world which tend to be unsystematic and even contradictory. This is not to say that theory and practice always go hand in hand, informing and correcting one another. When the Program began sixteen years ago, the official guidelines and policy statements advocated a model of ‘good practice’ for teachers and administrators that was far removed from what actually went on in most of the schools. This is probably still the case in some schools, but in others practice has outstripped the official philosophy of the Program itself. In their efforts to confront inequalities at the school level, workers in the Program have pioneered new models of ‘good practice’. The practice concept is also useful for avoiding one other type of opposition. Recent research into teaching is bedevilled by a split between approaches which, on the one hand, see structural constraint and the control and management of teachers and students as the primary reality, while, on the other, the focus is exclusively on the creative response of teachers and students to their work situation (Ozga and Lawn, 1988). We do not see this matter of constraint versus creative response as an either/or situation. All educational practices, of necessity, take place within a material context of limits and pressures. Teachers in DSP schools, for example, are faced with a limited budget, a set staff-student ratio, a more or less rigid timetable and standard syllabus requirements. At a wider level their action is also constrained by their employment conditions, private investment strategies and government policies that have an impact upon working-class communities. Within this situation, however, individuals and groups retain the capacity to transform the social arrangements into which they enter. Pierre Bourdieu (1974) has captured this tension between constraint and creativity in his phrase ‘innovation within limits’. We have been talking about practice as if it were a matter of individual action. This is not surprising since most educational philosophies and stated objectives take the individual as the object of educational practice. There is no doubt that this individualizing tendency is entrenched within educational practice, even in DSP schools. Teachers operate as individuals and the benefits of the educational process are typically measured in individual terms. But this is not the whole story. Educational practices constitute a social world and not merely an individual one. Schools are social institutions in which social interaction is governed by a complex web of formal and informal rules. Both staff and pupils generate distinct cultures containing a rich variety of collective practices. One

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of the questions we explore in this study is whether the DSP has contested the individualizing tendency within education by generating a set of collective practices to meet the needs of economically and educationally disadvantaged young people. Educational practice constantly changes with circumstances and time. Even definitions of ‘good practice’ change considerably as people grapple with obstacles, and think yet again about the stubborn facts of inequality and education. In our research we have tried to capture the way in which people in the DSP have faced up to the difficulties of their work and struggled to find solutions that were consistent with the aims of the Program. To do so we have used the techniques of social history and ethnography to retrace the history of practice in the DSP through the eyes of practitioners in the Program. Since a good deal of this history is not committed to paper, it was important to retrieve the experience by building up a collection of oral histories of key participants in the Program. Altogether, we have interviewed sixty-four people who at some time over the last sixteen years have had extensive experience of the Program at the school, regional and national levels. They include teachers, administrators, consultants, and parent representatives on Program committees. Some are still actively involved in the Program while others have moved on to other things. We have interviewed people from all states, and from both government and non-government systems. This is not a random sample of people who have worked in the Program; it is a purposive sample designed for richness and depth of data rather than representativeness. Within limits of time and cost this is the best way of documenting the institutional history of such a complex and far reaching Program. Using a set of focus questions, the interviewer guided the conversation to cover a range of themes: the social class, educational and occupational background of the participants; their careers as teachers, administrators, or parent activists; initial contact and impressions of the DSP; participation and experience in the Program over time; perceptions of how the Program has changed; distinctions between practice in DSP schools and mainstream schools; and ideas as to the limits and future possibilities of the Program. The oral histories, which lasted on average about ninety minutes, were taped and transcribed in the usual manner (Douglas et al, 1989). With a few notable exceptions (e.g. Weiler, 1988), life-histories, based on oral sources, have not been used in close-focused or ethnographic educational research. It might be useful therefore to say a little more about its use in this particular study. Perhaps the most common claim made on behalf of the method is that it challenges from below the historical myths and authoritative accounts of academic historians who have relied upon élite sources of information (Thompson, 1978). This democratizing function of the method is clearly important in critical research. In the case of our study, however, we were not primarily concerned to construct an alternative, grass-roots account of the DSP in order to refute a mythical, ‘official’ top-down version. We were more interested in the method because it opened up the possibility of exploring in a complex manner the construction of individual and collective practices within institutional contexts over time. In this regard, the life-history material was qualitatively richer than that produced by the standard interview format. Firstly, by framing the questions around personal biography, we were able to obtain a more holistic understanding of changing social practices. There was opportunity for the participants to express their values and attitudes, but these reflections were anchored in a narrative of personal biography. In describing actual incidents, wider historical events and personal anecdotes the participants were in fact talking about their own formation as teachers and activists in the DSP. The

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life-history method, therefore, allowed us to overcome a weakness inherent in the more common type of interview used in social surveys, namely, an overemphasis upon ahistorical, decontextualized attitudes (Elias and Scotson, 1965). A second advantage of the life-history material was that we were able to construct through the individual accounts of the activists something that resembled a collective biography. Our study was based upon the personal recollections of two generations of DSP activists. The first generation were teachers, parents and administrators who conceived, and gave form to the DSP in its early years. The second generation were those who were socialized into an already institutionalized Program. What both generations shared was an activist orientation to the Program as a vehicle for greater social justice. Although they differed in age, gender, social class background and hierarchical position within the system, it is impossible to read the oral histories without recognizing a common set of generational commitments that derived from the cultural and political critique of the 1970s and early 1980s. This type of collective or generational formation can be analyzed from life-history material. It is difficult to conduct such an analysis on the basis of standard survey interviews which typically treat their subjects as atomized individuals, shorn from their temporal and social contexts (Leach, 1967). B: Educational Inequality and the Transformation of Practice Renovating the Program In its earliest phase, the DSP was primarily about securing differential resources. Unlike compensatory programs in the USA and the UK, the Program was set up with two distinctively Australian features. First, it focused on the school as the site for action rather than the individual child (Headstart and Title I in the USA) or a socio-economic area (Educational Priority Areas in the UK). Secondly, it required school communities to collaborate around the objectives of the Program. These collaborative processes gave people within the DSP the opportunity to contest the dominant ideology of schooling and its explanation of inequality. It has provided the Program with an in built requirement that participants at the level of the school work together on the task of critical reflection and program development. In the early phase of the Program, however, it was resources rather than processes that were uppermost in people’s minds. At the time, there was a severe crisis in the inner-city schools of the big cities (Roper, 1970; Fitzgerald, 1976). Melbourne and Sydney, in particular, were experiencing population explosions, and most of the education budget went into building new schools rather than fixing up the old. In consequence, the inner city schools offered some of the most appalling working conditions for teachers and equally unsatisfactory learning conditions for children who struggled daily to make sense of a world that was often alien to them. One of our respondents vividly remembered visiting schools in the inner cities of Sydney and Melbourne at this time. I have never seen anything like it in my life. I will never forget that absolutely frightful primary school which was squashed in among factories and had a ten foot high mesh fence. Parents were not allowed in and all these Greek mothers were waiting outside in the street to pick up their kids. I was nearly weeping. I asked one of the teachers, ‘What would you do here? What

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would be the first thing that you would do if you had some money?’ And she said, ‘The first thing I would do is put something beautiful here, a fountain in the yard perhaps’. Seen in this context, the emphasis upon resources was quite understandable. ‘Isn’t this great’, a teacher was told by a colleague at the time, ‘this gets us out of the bargain basement onto the ground floor!’ For many at this time the DSP was important as a means of closing the resource gap between rich and poor schools. Our thinking originally was overwhelmingly about resources—it was class sizes, postage stamp playgrounds that melted in the sun and classrooms that were hot and uncomfortable. It all fitted in with something I’d read at university about compensatory education, which at that time was simply interpreted as kids coming from disadvantaged backgrounds. For us at the time, compensatory education translated itself into a differential staffing resource. I was a resource person and so were most of the other people at the time. But even from the beginning there was a realization among some activists that the power of the DSP to bring about change did not rest in resources as such, but in the processes that the increased funding set in motion: The money was pin money and it was never intended to be more than pin money. I think most of us realized that it wasn’t the money that would change things in schools and lead to better working places, it was the process of involving different partners in decision making and relocating the school in its own community. The money was the incentive. If you are talking about money to employ a community liaison officer for a year then it’s really small biddies… most of us always saw the money as a lever. It’s the classic mechanism of stimulating action in a particular direction so that the Department is forced to take note of the issues and hopefully build on it. But we were always realistic. The level of resourcing just wasn’t enough to fix up falling down schools, or make the staffing ratio adequate, or ensure that every kid learnt their community language or that kids in Engonia [a predominantly Aboriginal school in outback NSW] had their breakfast program just like the kids did in Bourke. While it is true that the main significance of the DSP lies in its processes, it is important to remember that later programs of staff development and whole school planning were made possible by the earlier period of catching up in basic resources. It’s difficult to get starving people to believe in God, argued one teacher by way of analogy! I think the DSP has been a major agent for challenging and changing teaching methodologies but it took some time for that to really develop. At the beginning many of the schools were resource starved and I think it was a little like trying to get people who are starving to believe in God. I mean you’ve got to deal with their starvation first! Initially in the DSP there needed to be something done about external, material things in the schools. Teachers and parents needed to see that their conditions were better and that was a necessary prerequisite before you

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could start talking to them about their teaching methods and curriculum. By doing that I think the systems paved the way for more positive impacts later on in the Program. The more recent tendency has been to de-emphasize the role of the DSP as a dispenser of funds for whatever shopping lists parents and teachers can devise and to stress instead programs of change that have a much more direct impact upon teaching and learning. The emphasis in the late 1980s has shifted to the curriculum, staff development and whole-school change. The change has not taken place to the same degree in all regions or systems. Nor has it been a steady, cumulative process of change. There was a period in the early 1980s in which the Program seemed to plateau. There was a loss of impetus and in some places a lack of leadership. State administrators saw a waning national leadership, a Program with relatively less funds at its disposal to support increasing numbers of children in need, and a Commonwealth Schools Commission preoccupied by the divisive state aid debate.1 A number of tensions became apparent in the Program during this period. First, the apparent threat to the Program as a whole limited the development of new ideas and initiatives. It was better to be safe, uncritical and low-key so as not to place the Program at greater risk. While understandable, this opened the Program to the criticism that it had grown rigid and tired and that the activists were protecting a Program that was no longer relevant. A member of the Commonwealth Schools Commission at the time recalled having to work through this dilemma. There was a lot of debate [in the early eighties] around the Program’s future, and critics were saying that we were so protective of the Program that we didn’t want to change it. And in retrospect that was true at the time. I mean though there was nothing much left, this Program at least gave you room to move. And we were worried that if you fiddled around with it when times were tough that was a stupid thing to do… It was politically hard to touch. But we were also anxious not to fiddle even though there was debate and new ideas were being developed. A hostile economic climate created a second set of tensions. Although never intended as a program that would provide recurrent funding, some schools have come to rely on the DSP to fund ongoing projects. It is a difficult decision, in situations like this, for school communities to wind down apparently successful projects in order to take risks with new initiatives. It is also difficult and confusing for teachers to understand and accept the redistributions that result in their school coming off the Program in favour of a relatively poorer school. The Index of Disadvantage2 might indicate that their school has gone over the cut-off point and can no longer be regarded as ‘disadvantaged’ but their day to day experience tells them that the clientele of the school is substantially the same and that the needs are just as great. In some instances, successful projects have continued without DSP support. But often the strategy of reserving DSP funds for risk taking and relying on self sufficiency to cover previously funded projects created predicaments. Excursions and camping experiences, initially standing alone as educational experiences, have increasingly featured as only one of a number of strategies to support a particular project. Yet one principal argues that the rigid rules in her region about funding for excursions highlights a dilemma for funding committees.

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When you’ve got to be self-sufficient, parents have to pay 100 per cent of the costs. And when that happened we lost a lot of kids from our camping program. We wangled a couple of hundred dollars, not much. We couldn’t become self sufficient. The irony is that the only way we could become self sufficient was to go out and sell cakes and make money. But it’s to avoid the cake stalls that the DSP began in the first place. Because that’s how we did it in those days. It’s sort of gone full circle, back to the cake days. There are clear signs that the DSP has recovered from the loss of impetus in the early 1980s. A National Review of the DSP in 1985 endorsed the Program and advocated a more effective national leadership. The Commonwealth Schools Commission, in its final reports, pointed to the importance of an empowering curriculum for DSP schools, a concept which has reinvigorated the curriculum debate within the Program. Recent Commonwealth concern about poverty, especially child poverty, has forced administrators to reconsider the nature of disadvantage in the 1990s and its implications for the DSP. A number of systems, particularly in Victoria and South Australia, have begun to conceptualize the DSP as one of several social and economic strategies operating under the general umbrella of social justice. These current responses illustrate the capacity of the program to renovate its purposes and practices in the light of changing conditions. Understanding Disadvantage The equity issue has been around education for a long time, certainly well before the DSP came on the scene in 1974. It has given rise to a vast literature (refer to Keeves, 1987, and Williams, 1989 for reviews) but little of it has examined how teachers understand the nature of disadvantage. The debates took place among academics and policy makers far removed from the teachers and parents who confronted the educational effects of poverty in their day to day practices. This was less so with the official discourse of the Schools Commission itself. When the Whitlam Labor government was elected in 1972, one of its first acts was to establish the Interim Committee of the Australian Schools Commission. The Committee, under the chairmanship of Peter Karmel, produced an influential report (Australia, Schools Commission, Interim Committee, 1973) which among other things recommended the establishment of the Disadvantaged Schools Program. Ideas about disadvantage in the Karmel Report, as it became known, and later Schools Commission reports, began to filter into discussion at the grass-roots of the Program (Johnston, 1983). But the official discourse did not limit the debates that took place; nor did it start them. In the years prior to the establishment of the Program, teachers were already searching for an alternative rationale for teaching that took account of the social context of schooling. In both Sydney and Melbourne, teachers and parents formed associations to highlight the problems of the inner city schools. One such group was the Inner City Education Alliance in Sydney and a teacher in our sample remembered her initial contact: It was 1973 when the Alliance began and I came into it after a couple of meetings. They were already writing the philosophical outline and for the first time people seemed to be talking about the particular problems in the inner city with working-class and ethnic kids. It still wasn’t acceptable to be talking about ‘poverty’ in educational circles but this group started

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saying that the social context was very important for teaching. And we all began reading and discussing and it was a really exciting period. It is difficult to understand this excitement without some idea of the social relations of teaching in disadvantaged schools in the early 1970s. The following interview extract gives a teacher’s account of one school community, but it is in no sense atypical. The DSP started to give people hope. The earlier experience was one of hopelessness. We felt isolated as teachers in our classrooms, isolated from the community and other schools. There was a lot of loneliness around, in the community as well as the school. Kids were generally pushed off to school, they were reluctant attenders. There was a derogatoriness between the staff and a hostility between staff and students. There were a few gags around at the time like, ‘There are only two jobs where you are holding people against their will—prison wardens and teachers at schools like this’. There was a lot of that sort of stuff. We were short of cutlery in the staffroom and some teachers objected to paying for tea and coffee and somebody said, ‘Oh, that’s all right. Tomorrow is market day and we can get anything we want as long as we tell the kids’. It was mainly a joke, but there was more than a little bit of truth in it. Some kids wagged regularly on Tuesdays and when we realized it was market day we became suspicious, especially when the police came round to the school. There was a funny side to all those things but there was also a sort of contempt about the kids and a readiness to blame the family situation for anything that went wrong. Teachers and parents were beginning to look closely at the communities from which their children came and the arrival of the Schools Commission and the DSP intensified the debates about the nature of disadvantage. The concern to take account of social context gained an immediate legitimation from the Karmel Report: The people I knew studied Chapter 9 of Karmel and wanted to use it as God’s own Bible. Someone would do something, only to hear someone else say, ‘Oh, you can’t do that. If you look on page 21, you’ll see that it’s wrong’. There was this amazing clinging to the document. I can remember having a copy of Karmel and the first Triennium Report which were annotated and cross-referenced and indexed so that you could flick to the right pages. The dependence on received opinion did not last. As some of the problems with the early ‘compensatory’ notions of disadvantage began to appear, teachers and parents developed their own forums for getting to grips with the meaning of disadvantage. By and large it was an evolutionary process, an ongoing struggle to understand the nexus between education and poverty. The effect on the participants, especially in the early days, could be quite exhilarating, as a parent records in the following extract. The issues we talked about at the conferences were not easy ones and sometimes we had to force people to come to grips with them. ‘What on earth do we do about parent participation? We have tried everything and it doesn’t work’. A perennial problem! ‘What does empowering

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kids really mean?’ I can remember workshops at an early conference in which people were saying that kids had too much power. ‘Outcomes? What do we mean by equality of outcomes?’ Everyone tried in a million different ways to explain that it didn’t mean sausages that would all look alike at the end. It took several years of working through to clarify some of these issues. An interesting part of the process was the realization that no-one had the answers. It was more a case—and some people found this very difficult—of people saying, ‘We are not asking you to guess the answers that we’ve got up our sleeve because we haven’t got any. We have got to work together to get a better understanding’. How was social context theorized? At any one time in the Program there were various definitions, as different languages were used by teachers and administrators. For some, the revival of childcentred progressivism in the 1970s provided a language of individual needs that was extended to encompass the social needs of the children. There were three of us on the senior staff who had had some four or five years at least in DSP schools. I think we brought with us a child-centred approach—really looking at the children. The DSP guidelines gave us a unique insight into the individual child, child development, looking at what children need. These children have these massive problems so what are we going to do? The traditional system is not going to help so we’ve got to find other approaches. For others, the discourse of community and parental involvement was used to focus on the culture of the students: The DSP successes are enormous. They are all to do with seeing kids in their social context. As teachers, we bring to the school our professional training and previous experience and fit that into the community, rather than imposing it. That’s a healthy thing the DSP has done and it’s been very successful across the board so that even new teachers soon pick up that you’ve got a responsibility to look at your school community. The discourse of community-school relations was powerful within the DSP. It was used, as we shall see, to raise some fundamental questions not only about power and decision making within schools but about the nature of the curriculum as well. In both cases, the underlying requirement was that teachers should gain a realistic knowledge of the cultural and economic conditions of the local school community. A third discourse of disadvantagement drew upon a language of social class and collective action. Just because kids go to élite schools and get the best jobs doesn’t mean that they have a good education. Everybody needs empowerment skills but it’s more critical for working-class kids because they are the ones that are more oppressed by the structures than the others. What is different for them is to get them to see how they fit into the system, to look closely at the oppressive structures and how they impact on their lives.

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This formulation of disadvantage, although never a dominant strand in the Program, has been an undercurrent from the beginning. It sees the DSP as a strategy for collective social change rather than one which rescues individuals from poverty and equips them to be socially mobile. Its central idea of collective power over circumstances derived from various sources, but as a formulation of disadvantage within the Program it became more widespread in the 1980s as deficit and difference notions of educational inequality came under criticism (e.g. Sharp, 1980; NSW Department of Education, 1986). What these different accounts of disadvantage have in common is a refusal to blame the victim. Over and over again activists talked about going beyond ‘deficit’ notions of disadvantagement that located the source of the problems in the families or the young people themselves. Where the Program is least effective you have teachers who are still hung up with the terrible poverty of the kids and who have an image of Mums and Dads who don’t look after them, who don’t believe in education and are non-supportive. They try to shift the blame for what they don’t feel they are achieving themselves to the home situation. One reason for the liveliness of the debates among activists in the Program is that they are trying to resolve some very real tensions and contradictions that exist in the understandings about disadvantage. One problem is how to acknowledge cultural differences as a basis for learning while at the same time refusing to ‘label’. An early example of cultural affirmation pioneered by the DSP was teacher-based materials production. Some teachers quickly realized that the reading material that they were able to purchase with Program funding contained images and meanings that were far removed from the cultural experiences of working class and ethnically diverse children. They began to produce their own material that acknowledged and valued the culture of the students. One set, described below, was produced for a predominantly Aboriginal school community. Being able to affirm themselves through looking at themselves in books was good for kids. It was no longer ‘them’ over ‘there’ as in those Janet and John readers. To put pictures of Aboriginal people in Engonia into a book says to Aboriginal people, ‘I can be in a book, my auntie can be in a book’. Simple things but they do have an effect on the kids’ perceptions of their parents, themselves and their race. Similar things happened with the work done in the DSP about multicultural education. Reaffirming and cultural maintenance work. To acknowledge and not to label is one pole of the problem. To acknowledge and not romanticize is the other. This is a particular problem with teachers who use the discourse of class and collective action because, as one teacher pointed out, the notion that the ‘working class is beautiful’ can be just as misleading a guide to action as the ‘working class is ugly’. I initially thought that you had to start locally, with local curriculum stuff, and I moved away from that position. We had these endless discussions about the wheat silos in Balmain. You know, we’ll take them down to the wheat silos and they’ll sort of realize themselves through looking at their local history and how the wheat silos came to be in Balmain. I guess I was influenced by the notion that by relying on the assumption that the working class was

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complete in itself, you were locking working-class kids into working-class culture. I mean it was a romanticized view of working-class culture with no faults. There seems to be widespread agreement within the Program that the competitive academic curriculum by and large does not work for young people in DSP schools. The challenge is to develop an alternative model that responds to the cultural contexts of working-class children and empowers them with skills and knowledge to enter the economic and political mainstream of Australian life. When it comes to spelling out the shape of the model there is less agreement. What does it mean for a curriculum to be relevant and meaningful? How does one resolve the conflict between a locallybased curriculum and one with common elements of skill and knowledge? What does one mean by a working-class curriculum? These were not detached, academic questions. Teachers were searching vigorously and quickly for strategies that would result in more effective learning for their students. One of the strengths of the Program was that it focused the minds of ordinary, everyday rank and file teachers on important curriculum issues in a way that had never been done before, at least in my experience. The level of discussion about curriculum rose and with it a heightened understanding. A further fundamental tension emerged as the Program developed. This was whether the DSP can tolerate a plurality of ideas about disadvantage or whether projects should conform to a particular current philosophy. It must be remembered that the Program as a whole has very diffuse goals. Despite the official documents and Guidelines, it is up to the Program personnel at the level of the schools and regions to make distinctions between good and bad projects. ‘What is the philosophy of the DSP?’ is a question that is frequently raised in the committees. ‘What understanding of disadvantage underlies this particular project that we are being asked to approve?’ There were heated debates around these questions as the Program developed. One must also bear in mind the uneven nature of the Program. Deficit and compensatory notions that have been rejected in some schools and regions are alive and well elsewhere in the Program. These factors, as the following teacher representative on a regional committee explained, have led to tensions in the way that projects are approved. The only really clear debates I remember on the regional committee at that stage were administrative ones. There was very little on the philosophical development of the program. And looking back, we’d all be horrified now at the sort of things that we discussed and funded. I’m thinking of the sort of reading programs that were funded, commercial programs like DISTAR and SRA. They were in the stage of ‘It’s the school’s decision and as long as they seem to know what they are doing and they have costed it properly, it will be funded’. When people started to get to grips with what the program was all about, things started to get pretty lively and the divisions on the committee started. We began to look at issues like social work and whether that was a DSP responsibility or a system responsibility and a move began to push out social workers. We started to look at the processes in the schools that produced the projects, how and why they were developed.

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A final point about the difficulties of language. Many activists acknowledged that the DSP was really about social class. But because class discourse was thought to be divisive and unacceptable in policy discussion, they chose to rephrase their concerns in other words. The activists speak very clearly about this continuing tension and the lack of clarity that sometimes resulted. The following two extracts, one from a teacher and the other from a parent, illustrate how people at the grassroots of the Program were struggling to find a language that was both politically effective and an accurate description of disadvantage. We began to talk about relevant and meaningful curriculum for working-class kids. If these kids were different, we need to establish just how they are different in their culture so that we can absorb it into our curriculum practice. But at the time it was not at all as clear as that. We were being bombarded. Every time we opened our mouths, teachers argued with us left, right and centre. ‘What do you mean by working-class?’ ‘What do you mean they are not culturally deprived—of course they are culturally deprived!’ ‘What do you mean it’s not compensatory education—of course it’s compensatory!’ ‘What do you mean it’s not resource deficit—of course it’s resource deficit!’ It was difficult to argue with some of these points. Schools were starved for resources, absolutely starved, so that to have to think through all this philosophical high-falutin’ stuff in order to write a submission to justify getting the absolute basic resources was at best nonsense, and at worst a real political threat. So we were being bombarded by people who were our friends. At the same time we were operating within a departmental framework. And the problem was to find a language which would allow us to develop the radical edge of our thinking and yet not galvanize our political enemies to crush the Program. That encouraged a kind of educational verbiage which meant the analysis wasn’t sharp enough for the issues ever to be really joined. The Program is not about compensating for some deficiency. It’s about something quite different. But you couldn’t talk about the ‘working class’ and ‘class differences’. How could you find ways around that?’ Inequality’ was OK but ‘class differences’ was not OK. To talk about ‘poverty was not all that popular, despite the work of the Poverty Commission. Notions of ‘power’ and ‘empowerment’ came much later…can see that these debates were helpful because they made us think of ways to skirt certain conflicts. But the problem remains. If the Program is not about the poor, the small percentage who can’t feed themselves, then who is it for? And if you eliminate social class in the analysis, what are you left with? Making a DSP Teacher It was not uncommon in our interviews to hear people talk about DSP teachers as if they were a recognizable species. Several remarked that having worked in a particular DSP school, they immediately felt at home when they visited similar schools elsewhere. This sense of distinctiveness is in part due to the fact that DSP schools by definition serve communities with something in common —major social and economic disadvantage. Our respondents, however, were hinting at a different type of distinctiveness. In referring to the ethos of the DSP school, they were remarking on the way that the Program over the years has generated its own distinct culture.

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Becoming a DSP teacher, in this cultural sense, is not merely a matter of being appointed or transferred to a DSP school. The DSP culture and the DSP school overlap but do not coincide. It is quite possible, for example, to teach in a DSP school and never become part of the ongoing culture of the Program. How then does one become a DSP teacher? For many of the people we interviewed, the Program itself provided a focus and direction for ideas and practices that had already begun to find expression. In fact, a majority of the respondents had developed a commitment to equality and social justice prior to working in the DSP. There was no single source of this commitment to work with the educationally disadvantaged. In some cases it was acquired as a result of growing up in a working-class community. I had always had an interest in kids that failed and you didn’t have to be any sort of genius to see that the kids who failed were basically working-class kids. Most of my school friends were relatively low achieving kids who didn’t make the cut-off point in the old selection process for selective schools. I think when I was at school I was aware of an unfairness about the schooling system, and it seemed to me that the kids who didn’t do well, it wasn’t their fault. For a long time my interest was in the kids that failed and I don’t know that I really became conscious of a close link between school failure and social class until everyone else did, in the Whitlam era. In other instances, it was education itself which sharpened an awareness of educational inequality. The formative, early period of the DSP coincided with an educational climate of radical critique in Australia and overseas. Although there were different strands to the critique, the central argument was that schooling alienated working-class pupils and systematically perpetuated social inequality. Although it would be misleading to imply that these critiques were generally absorbed into teacher education or that they had a wide influence on teachers in the schools, within our sample a majority of the teachers and parents acknowledged that they had read and discussed books and articles which formed part of this critical debate. Some traced their interest in the DSP directly to an encounter with these ideas at college and university. When I was at university my three majors were History, Politics and Philosophy. And from that—and probably from my own experience of being on the rough end of wealthy kids—I developed a sense of justice and fairness and that things aren’t right in this world. I certainly became interested in Marxist philosophy and later on feminist philosophy. And from that I became particularly interested in going to teach in a DSP school. When I went from university to teachers’ college for a year the only people who seemed to be showing any interest in what was happening to working-class kids were in DSP schools. A further type of preparation for the Program, especially in the early years, was the experience of teaching in Britain, and in the Inner London Education Authority in particular. In the 1960s and early 1970s it was not uncommon for recently qualified Australian teachers to travel overseas for a few years before returning to settle into a teaching career. Many of these young teachers worked as casual teachers in the ethnically diverse, working-class schools of inner London. Here is how one teacher in our sample described the London experience:

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When I went to England I just got off the plane on Sunday and on Monday I had a job because they were so desperate for teachers in Inner London. In my first year I was teaching at a school in which most of the kids were Sikhs and terribly conscientious. Then I went to South Kilburn High which was about 50% West Indian. I’d never seen anything like it. Those West Indian kids were just amazing, fantastic kids to teach. I’ve never experienced anything so extraordinary as those kids. They had names like Winston Pitt, you know. I have images like, you know when you see black skins sort of glistening and you think how beautiful? Well it was freezing and the poor buggers, their skin just flaked off because of the cold and they weren’t properly dressed and they just go sort of grey looking. They were aggro and into Rastafarian stuff and steel bands and the cops were always picking them up on suspicion. Those were the issues that politicized me. ‘Where’s Winston this morning?’ ‘Oh, he got picked up by the cops last night Miss’. For others in our sample, the commitment to alleviating the educational effects of poverty had a religious basis. Catholic nuns, working in the Catholic school system, saw from the beginning the importance of the DSP as a field in which to express their vocation to the poor. As the Catholic community became more gentrified, nuns in teaching orders that traditionally served the poor found themselves teaching in affluent schools. Choosing to teach in a DSP school was one way of resolving this crisis in their ministry. In a number of systems, they have continued to occupy a key role in maintaining and developing the Program. Here it was mostly nuns who were in charge of the DSP when it began and they just saw it as an extension of the mission that they were on about. Our Order had a series of meetings in 1972 looking at education—what we were doing, who we were serving. We decided that it was time for us to focus our attention on assisting kids from poorer backgrounds. We saw that as something we ought to be doing if we were true to our mission and traditions. As a result of that we decided that I should leave the middle-class school that I was at and go into a poorer area. These are the voices of the first generation of DSP teachers, the generation who constructed the culture. It is impossible to read the oral histories of this group without realizing that they were aware that they were shaping a Program. In the process of arguing about the meaning of disadvantage and what kind of structures and processes there should be, they formed strong social networks and professional identities. It was a period of conflicting viewpoints, and the conflicts in many ways heightened the emotional commitment to the Program. The following comment from a teacher describes how conflict was both a source of strain and cohesion: In some ways the DSP wasn’t really kids. It was submissions and it was hard yakka and it was the camaraderie of everyone who worked really hard together to get submissions funded. That’s where the emphasis was—meeting deadlines and literally writing hundreds of pages of documentation and ringing up firms and getting prices. And it all impinged on our work as classroom teachers at school. And there were battles within the school.

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Later generations of DSP teachers entered an already established Program. They encountered the DSP as both a formal system of committees and processes and an informal network of practices and ideas. Many of these teachers had not chosen to teach in a DSP school. Many came straight from university or college and our material suggests that they had learnt little about the DSP or even the social contexts of learning in their pre-service training. I didn’t really know anything about the Program. When I read up on it, I identified with it and was quite excited. I never heard about it at all in teachers’ college, didn’t hear about any special programs. The principal of my school said that he was trying to get us declared disadvantaged but the message we got was that we would get extra money. But when I read the handouts I thought this is great because for the first time what I actually thought had been verbalized. I immediately identified with it. What happens to these uninformed teachers? Some experience culture shock and never identify with the DSP at all. Eventually most of these will put in for transfers and move on to schools in other areas in which they feel more at home. Some will stay on as opponents of the Program intent on blocking change. Others adopt a ‘business as usual’ approach as if all schools were the same. Others come to identify with the DSP and the framework it provides for teachers in working-class schools. These are the ones who enter the DSP culture, and go on to develop and renovate the program at the school and regional levels. Why are some teachers ‘captured’ by the Program whereas others are repelled? For some, we have argued, it is a recognition that the Program coincided with already formed moral and educational ideals about equality and social justice. But it is also something to do with the micro-culture of the school itself. How does a new member of the teaching staff encounter the DSP for the time? At staff meetings? In informal conversations in the staff room? Does the Program only become a topic for public discussion when the time comes around to write submissions for future projects? Has the Program developed systematic ways in which to induct new staff members into the culture of the DSP? Our material suggests that initiation into the ethos and practices of the Program is more likely to occur through informal and unsystematic contacts than through a formal process of inservicing. More often than not it was a case of being elected to the DSP committee in the school and gradually discovering what the Program was all about. The likelihood of teachers being inducted into the culture of the DSP is much greater if they happen to be in a school in which the principal, staff and parents have built the DSP practices into the ongoing, routine life of the school. Here, the induction is not simply a matter of gaining public knowledge about the Program and how it works. The sense of common purpose and responsiveness to the needs of the community is expressed not only when the annual submission for funding is written but in virtually every discussion within the school. In the following extract, a principal notes how whole school planning became institutionalized in his school: What you do is develop whole school approaches and actually institutionalize the processes. Schools are institutions and they do a lot of things by ritual and routine. If there is going to be real change, you just can’t come in as a principal or a teacher and say, ‘Here’s a good idea,

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let’s go with it’. You have got to, over a period of years, develop rituals in the school that are ones that allow for needs analysis, deciding as a whole school what we are on about, where we are going. So you don’t ask, ‘Shall we have parents on our committee?’ That’s a ritual, that’s understood, that’s just part of it. It’s already decided before you get there. Induction into Program is one aspect of becoming a DSP teacher. An equally important matter is maintaining a sense of purpose and an energy to bring about change. One of the features of the Program often mentioned by respondents is its capacity to produce burn-out in teachers. We developed a staff that was very committed, very hard-working and close knit. A large number of them came because they wanted to work with me. They were young, enthusiastic. And the school was very demanding on them, more than I think in retrospect that it had a right to be. I guess my administrative style added to that. I expected a hell of a lot of commitment. It placed huge demands on the people and on their personal lives. If I can exaggerate for a bit, relationships within the school were so strong that any outside the community didn’t really have much chance of survival. So marriages broke up—and I wouldn’t do that again. And my own kids will tell you that I changed over that period. I gradually disappeared out of their lives more and more. And I think that is typical of the DSP. For the first generation of DSP activists, the level of energy and commitment was sustained by the awareness that they were part of a wider movement of reform and innovation. The argument that public institutions should more adequately serve the interests of the clients rather than the bureaucrats and the professionals, created impetus for change in the areas of community development, health, welfare and urban development as well as education. In those early days, there was also a greater emphasis upon working together to define the philosophy of the Program. There were frequent seminars and conferences in which the purposes of the Program and the nature of disadvantage were debated at length. There were disagreements and conflicts along the way, but networks of support were created which sustained the impetus for reform. It has been difficult to sustain this impetus into the 1990s. The more general reform movement has dissipated. The Program has had to sustain itself while educational policies have become more conservative and equity objectives the subject of critical scrutiny. The signs of poverty are less visible, even though objective evidence indicates that poverty is in fact more deeply entrenched in working-class communities than hitherto. In the early days, the stark facts of resource-poor public schools stared everyone in the face: a visible, physical embodiment of poverty that became a focus for DSP intervention. In the 1990s, and largely as a result of the DSP and Commonwealth funding, most schools are physically better off. Poverty and education have assumed a more subtle relation. Where the signs of disadvantage no longer appear simply as impoverished schools, the Program has to develop other images of poverty that can sustain school communities in the process of school reform. Making Decisions One of the important requirements of the Schools Commission when it established the DSP was that there would be collective input into the planning and implementation of projects. In order to obtain

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funds, schools are expected to analyze the needs of the school community, to look critically at their own activities and demonstrate that their proposed projects will lead to more effective and enjoyable outcomes for students. There are really two sets of practices that evolved in the DSP to meet this requirement. The first is the way in which decision making processes became established and the form they eventually took. The second is how this machinery, once established, gradually led to participatory practices of whole school planning. Neither of these changes can be explained in terms of the DSP alone; they were part of a broader movement that began as far back as the early 1960s to modify the exercise of power and control within education. In some states, parent organizations were mounting strong arguments for the establishment of representative school committees. Teacher unions were adding professional arguments to their traditional industrial claims by insisting on representation on Departmental committees. In many states and systems, the centre had relinquished direct controls over the school curriculum by adopting a school-based curriculum model. While it is important not to exaggerate these democratic impulses—in no sense did they topple the centralized, hierarchical model of control that characterized most of the systems—it is important to acknowledge that the DSP was operating throughout much of its history in this climate. In this context we can more easily understand the varied responses to a Commonwealth program which had a built-in requirement for democratic decision making and whole school planning. For those administrators and teachers who are content with the prevailing patterns of power and decision making, the DSP is akin to a virus in the system. It is like a democratic implant in a hierarchical body. The impulse is to reject it, fearful that it will eventually spread throughout the system. Outright rejection is not easy, however, because of the resources involved. For the more autocratically minded, it was a catch-22 position: reject it and have fewer resources, accept it and have less power. Of course there is another option; accept the resources and be seen to be democratic without really changing the structures of power. This is by no means an uncommon strategy. Some teachers reported cases in the early days of the Program where the school executive simply disregarded any decisions made by the staff in their meetings. A group of the staff wanted to have democratic staff meetings. The Acting Principal would call staff meetings and the Executive wouldn’t turn up, or he himself wouldn’t turn up. At one stage he put the meetings on at the same time as the assembly which went on behind a partition so that you couldn’t hear a word. If anybody, especially a mere assistant, put forward an idea and it happened to get popular support, it simply didn’t get implemented because the executive weren’t interested in implementing it. It was even more common to hear of instances in which the principal and executive obeyed the letter of the law by establishing a school committee but evaded the spirit by using it to ratify proposals and decisions that had been worked out by the executive beforehand. As a member of the regional committee I was given liaison schools and I went to them two or three times during the year to look at their submissions and to discuss how it was put together. Some of the schools had committees but it was pretty token. There were schools in

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which the boss wrote the submission and then got the rubber stamp from the staff and parents. There were others that were really struggling to get the parents involved. Resistance to the democratic, participatory nature of the Program is not only a defensive reaction towards a wider sharing of power within the schools and on regional and state committees. It is also a reaction to a change in the social relations of authority. When teachers and parents act on the basis that they have a right to express their views and participate in decisions, they are sometimes seen as undermining the deference and respect which accompanies the traditional pattern of authority. For those who are used to the male world of executive power, the threat also involves a shift in gender relations as well. Some teachers saw the period as one in which they were going to change the system and have all sorts of exciting innovations whereas others like the principal saw authority being undermined, especially by women. The executive as a whole, the people who had reached status positions, suddenly felt that there was a new wave that didn’t give them quite the respect and courtesy that they expected. Disempowerment for some becomes empowerment for others. Teachers and parents experienced an extension of their roles in the school. First, it gave them an opportunity to ask some fundamental questions about whose school it was, and the purposes it should serve. These questions were normally seen as being part of an executive prerogative, outside the classroom teachers’ and parents’ domain. Secondly, it provided for teachers and parents the basis for a strong sense of ‘ownership’ of the Program. Through collaboration and joint decision making, they worked through the issues and in the process became committed to the projects they constructed. Thirdly, as the following comment from a coordinator indicates, it reduced the isolation of the classroom teacher and allowed the sharing of experience and resources. The DSP has given some hope to these teachers. There is a strong sharing element in the program and when people come together, they find out that what they are experiencing is happening in other schools as well. And they share ways of addressing those concerns. When teachers are given more responsibility in the total planning of the school, they realize they are not powerless. Finally, it reduced the traditional exclusion of parents from educational discussion and decision making. There were difficulties in broadening participation but in some schools working with parents and the community became an expected part of teacher practice. It’s important to note that this whole school planning approach was not spelt out with any precision in the guidelines of the Program. There were no ready-made formulas to apply. The whole school approach was primarily constructed at the level of the school, although regional and state committees also endorsed and encouraged the practice. It was not achieved without difficulty. It required principals who were prepared to work with staff and parents. Large secondary schools, with rigid organizational structures and a final year examination that casts its shadow over the

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curriculum, have limited capacity to develop whole school collaborative processes. The tendency, especially among secondary teachers, was to restrict one’s attention to classroom problems. When we have curriculum days, teachers want to get into what happens in their classrooms. But in order to understand your bit of the jigsaw, you need to understand the whole jigsaw. I don’t think there is enough opportunity to do that because of the pressures of trying to maintain what it is you are doing in your own classroom. Opening up the decision making processes to teachers who had previously only been signatories to submissions written by others, placed new strains on the staff. Communication in large schools has always been a problem. The mechanics of getting the entire staff to make decisions about which programs should be submitted for consideration by the regional committee is beautifully described in the following extract. They kept vaguely referring to ‘this day’ that was going to occur in September where you stayed at the school until the decision was made. I remember veiled hints about it. When the day finally arrived, you’d discover that they were putting forward something like twenty-five separate programs, bits and pieces of paper. The regional committee had asked us to put them in priority order and it was done by attrition. You stayed at the school until such time as somebody gave in. I can remember trying to establish a wide reading program and everyone agreeing it was such a good program and we therefore put it at the 11th slot so that everything above it would get funded because the committee funded from the top down. No one wanted their program to go below a certain point because that’s where the money cut out. When we move from teachers to parents, a new set of tensions becomes apparent. It was a requirement of the Program that parents be partners in the shared decision-making at school, area and state levels. Some schools took this stipulation very seriously and to a considerable extent DSP schools pioneered parental involvement. The empowering of parents, however, involved more than the right to be represented on a committee. One parent, who has had long experience with parental involvement in whole school planning, describes how the concept of parental partnership evolved in response to practical difficulties. Our first aim was to get parents and teachers together on the committees and we thought that when we’d achieved that it would all happen. But of course it didn’t. So we thought of all sorts of strategies to get parents involved and talking. To some extent that worked because parents began doing in the school lots of things that they weren’t doing before. But it stopped there. We were reluctant to have a go at the big issues. A few years ago, people began saying that parents needed to be involved in curriculum discussions. But we never found a way to sustain people as they made that difficult shift. Because nobody really knows how to do it. We do know that it’s a long process but we have not been prepared to acknowledge that it will take a few years.

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These are tensions between participants in the process of whole school planning. There is another set of tensions which stem from the fragmented, self-contained manner in which school projects are developed. Although it was not the intention of the Interim Committee, the DSP has become a project based Program. Schools think of projects, submissions are prepared, and if they are approved, funds are provided. In many cases, the individual projects are regarded as extras, stitched onto the main-stream structures of day to day school life. Whole school planning is not just about involving all parties in the major educational decisions. It is also about examining the organizational structures and practices of the school as a whole. Unless one thinks about collaborative whole school planning in this way, the add-ons of special DSP packages are bound to be ineffective, as the following extract suggests: I’ve gradually developed a different view of whole school programs. I don’t think they mean that every kid has to be part of it. The important aspect of it is the decision making process and whether you have involved the whole school community in the process. But it’s more than that. Whole school programs have implications for teacher attitudes and practices in the classroom. Take streaming as an example. If you stream your school strictly on ability, then I don’t think there is any point in running a whole school self-esteem program. There is very little point in changing certain classroom practices if you have an assessment system which goes against the change by punishing some kids. So you have really got to look at your basic teaching and learning practices and see them as a whole school program before you can look at the needs of certain groups within the school like non-English speaking girls. Despite these tensions, the DSP has pioneered the whole school approach. The Program has given legitimacy to some isolated attempts to claim more autonomy at the school level. It is important, however, not to over-estimate the influence of the Program in shifting the balance of power at the level of the school. Certainly it gave to teachers and some parents a taste of decision making that occasionally spread to other areas of the school. Overall, however, it has been a lever for redistributing power and decision making while not basically altering the entrenched structures of executive power. It is appropriate to finish this section with an extract from an interview in which the respondent reflects on these limitations. The closest we got to structural change was to push for greater democratic processes: the role of teachers to have an input, and the role of parents and kids. It was a pretty unsophisticated analysis. It wasn’t really an organizational analysis of bureaucracy and how it worked. Apart from the submission model, where inspectors sat down with teachers and parents, it didn’t really have an impact on such things as the way Principals ran their schools. I’m talking at a systemic level. At the individual school level, there is no doubt that the DSP mobilized teachers as nothing really has since. It gave teachers for the first time something substantial to make a decision about. But it was still very dependent upon the structures of power that gave the Principal so much control.

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C: Reflecting on Policy through Practice The life-history material discussed in this chapter was collected as part of a broader project to provide a research base for policy development around the DSP.3 Such a use of qualitative methodology departed in significant ways from the dominant, empiricist understanding of the relationship between research and social policy. Finch (1986:37) sums up the recurring themes in this tradition. …the impartial collection of facts; an unproblematic conception of ‘facts’, based on a positivist epistemology; a belief in the direct utility of such facts in shaping measures of social reform which can be implemented by governments; and a strong preference for statistical methods and the social survey as the most suitable technique for fact-gathering. A number of writers have contested this dominance by demonstrating the value of ethnographic methods in policy-oriented studies (Pollard, 1984; Finch, 1986; Rist, 1981). While these studies have discussed important general concerns about the role of qualitative research in the policy formation process, they have not specifically looked at the contribution of oral history as a method. We will conclude this chapter by commenting on the significance of life-history material in policyoriented research. We can begin by asking who makes policy. The conventional answer locates the policy-maker at the upper levels of government and administration, far removed from people lower down in the organization who put the policies into practice. The applied social scientist is the technician who supplies reliable factual information and interpretations to the policy-maker who uses it to develop new policy directions. This is the social engineering model (Bulmer, 1982) of applied social research. Finch (1986) has described this as the ‘up, along and down’ model of policy-oriented research: ‘pass the recommendations upwards and eventually the changes will be passed downwards’. As far as the DSP is concerned, it is important to contest this orthodox account of the researchpolicy-making relationship. It is true that certain decisions are made at the political and senior administrative level that influence the operation of the Program at the grass roots. Typically these decisions are about the level of overall funding, variations in the Index of Disadvantage which determines the range of schools in the Program and changes to the Commonwealth Guidelines that set out the broad Program objectives. But it is quite misleading to restrict the notion of policymaking to this level. As we have seen, it was a conscious intention of those who established the Program to devolve a great many policy decisions to practitioners. Decisions about what kinds of projects to fund, about what kind of submissions to write, about the very definition of disadvantage —these are made at the level of the school, and the regional and state committees. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the character of the Program, and how it is experienced on a daily basis by students and teachers, is influenced by policy making at these localized levels. By means of the oral histories we have been able to listen to the activists in the Program reflect on their practice. They are not the voices of passive subjects implementing policy directives that arrive from above. They are the voices of practitioners who struggle to understand the nature of educational disadvantage, who weigh up the merits of one project proposal against another, and who are constantly thinking of ways to use very limited resources to alleviate the effects of poverty upon young people. In a very direct sense they are the voices of people engaged in policy-making.

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And this kind of policy-making is a very practical activity of strategic action within a context of limits and pressures. It is one of the ironies of educational reform that some of the limits were self imposed. At the same moment as they were constructing a Program, the activists were also creating structures and processes that they would later experience as constraints. The life history approach is a valuable way of documenting the change in strategic thinking over time as participants became aware of the pressures and limits within which they worked. Knowledge gained through social research is always used in a political context of differential power and resources. In recognition of the fact that crucial policy-making within the DSP occurs at the practitioner level, we have used a ‘lateral ripple’ (Finch, 1986) strategy to disseminate the research rather than an ‘up, along and down’ model. In this way, the knowledge is directly accessible to practitioners who make policy decisions at the organizational level and who can exert pressure for policy change at higher levels in the Program. The knowledge itself is not in the form of a list of recommendations to be implemented. It is a history of evolving practice in the face of changing social and educational conditions. It is useful in the policy context to the degree that it reflects back to practitioners the complexity of their practice, continuities with past practices and ongoing debates. The effect of research on policy is hardly ever direct. In the case of the life history research that forms the basis of this study, its major contribution is that it retrieves a history of strategic thinking and action which is at the heart of policy-making in the Program. By reconnecting with that history, participants in the Program are empowered to make policy in the present. This is the relationship between research and policy that Finch alludes to when she writes (1986), The research process itself in a sense becomes a means of empowering the powerless, by sharing with them the ability to reflect upon one’s own position, to see one’s circumstances as a product of social forces, to modify one’s self image, or to identify points at which the means of social change lie within one’s grasp. Notes 1 In 1984 the Commonwealth Schools Commission was divided over the recommendation to go to government about the level of funding for private schooling. This resulted in a Majority Report signed by ten members and two Minority Reports, one by the public school teacher unions and one by the public school parent organizations. 2 The Index of Disadvantage is a scale that uses different socio-economic variables to range schools along a gradient from the very worst off to the very best off. The Index has changed from time to time over the history of the Program and the different educational systems use variations on the Index to decide which schools will be included in the Program. 3 The material in this chapter is drawn from a larger study into poverty and education. In 1987, the Commonwealth Schools Commission funded a national research project at Macquarie University to provide research support for a continuing process of policy development in and around the DSP. The Poverty, Education and the DSP Project has produced the following reports: Report 1: Williams, P. (1988) Research on Poverty and Education: Descriptive Research. 1979–1987, with commentary and policy implications by Connell, R.W. and White, V., Sydney, Macquarie University.

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Report 2: Connell, R.W., and White, V. (1988) Child Poverty and Educational Action, based on a paper presented to the Child Poverty Conference, Melbourne, Sydney, Macquarie University. Report 3: White V., and Young, S. (1988) Disadvantaged Schools Program Directory: Sources of Information about the Program, Sydney, Macquarie University. Report 4: Allen, S., Connell, R.W., and White, V. (1989) Pictures of the Disadvantaged Schools Program in Action, Drawn from its own Documents, Sydney, Macquarie University. Report 5: Wilson, B., and Wyn, J. (1988) Funding and Innovation: a comparative study of two secondary schools approaches to innovation, one a school with continuous DSP support, the other with no support from the DSP, Sydney, Macquarie University. Report 6: Johnston, K.M., and White, V. (1988) A Program in Action Changing Practice in the Disadvantaged Schools Program, Sydney, Macquarie University. Report 7: White, V., Johnston, K.M., and Connell, R.W. (1988) Working Paper 1: Issues Raised in Stage 1 of the Research, Sydney, Macquarie University. Report 8: Connell, R.W. (1990) Teachers, Teaching and the Disadvantaged Schools Program: a Survey, Sydney, Macquarie University. Report 9: Johnston, K.M., Keely, A., and White, V. (1991) Organisational Practice and Educational Change: The Disadvantaged Schools Program in the South Australian Catholic Education System, Sydney, Macquarie University. Policy Report: Connell, R.W., White, V., and Johnston, K.M. (1990) Project Overview and Discussion of Policy Questions: General Report of the Poverty, Education and the DSP Project, Sydney, Macquarie University. The reports are available from Poverty, Education and the DSP Project, Sociology Department, Macquarie University, NSW, Australia. 2109. An expanded version of the material dealt with in this chapter is contained in Report 6.

References AUSTRALIA, SCHOOLS COMMISSION, INTERIM COMMITTEE (1973) Schools in Australia, Interim Committee for the Australian Schools Commission (The Karmel Report), Canberra, Australian Government Printing Service. BOURDIEU, P. (1974) Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. BULMER, M. (1982) The Uses of Social Research: Social Investigation in Public Policy Making, London, Allen and Unwin. CASSIDY, G. (1978) Report of a study of the implementation of the Disadvantaged Schools Program of the Schools Commission 1974–1977, Canberra, Commonwealth Schools Commission. DOUGLAS, L., ROBERTS, A., and THOMPSON, R. (1989) Oral History: a Handbook, Sydney, Allen and Unwin. ELIAS, N., and SCOTSON, J. (1965) The Established and the Outsiders, Cass, New Sociological Library. FINCH, J. (1986) Research and Policy: The Uses of Qualitative Methods in Social and Educational Research, London, Falmer Press. FITZGERALD, R.T. (1976) Poverty and Education in Australia, Canberra, Australian Government Printing Service. JOHNSTON, K.M. (1983) ‘A Discourse for All Seasons? An Ideological Analysis of the Schools Commission Reports, 1973–1981’, The Australian Journal of Education, 27, 1, pp. 17–32. KEEVES, J.P. (1987) Australian Education: Review of Recent Research, Sydney, Allen and Unwin. LEACH, E. (1967) ‘An anthropologists’ reflections on a social survey’, in JONGMANS, D., and GUTKIND, P. (Eds) Anthropologists in the Field, Assen, Van Gorcum, pp. 75–88. NEW SOUTH WALES DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION (1986) Equality of Outcomes: An Issues Paper, prepared by the New Disadvantaged Schools Program, Sydney.

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OZGA, J., and LAWN, M. (1988) ‘Schoolwork: Interpreting the Labour process of Teaching’, in British Journal of Sociology of Education, 9, 3, pp. 323–36. POLLARD, A. (1984) ‘Ethnography and social policy for classroom practice’, in BARTON, L., and WALKER, S. (Eds) Social Crisis and Educational Research, London, Croom Helm. RIST, R. (1981) ‘On the utility of ethnographic research for the policy process’, Urban Education, 15, 4, pp. 485–9. ROPER, T. (1970) The Myth of Equality, North Melbourne, National Union of Australian Students. RUBY, A., REDDEN, J., SOBSKI, J., and WILLMOT, E. (1985) Report of the National Review of the Disadvantaged Schools Program, Canberra, Commonwealth Schools Commission. SHARP, R. (1980) The Culture of the Disadvantaged: Three views, a discussion paper prepared for the Disadvantaged Schools Program, Canberra, Schools Commission, No. 5. THOMPSON, P. (1978) The Voice From the Past: Oral History, Oxford, Oxford University Press. WEILER, K. (1988) Women Teaching for Change: Gender, Class and Power, South Hadley, MA, Bergin and Garvey. WILLIAMS, P. (1989) Research on Poverty and Education: Australian Descriptive Research 1979–1989, Report 1 of the Poverty, Education and the DSP Project, Macquaire University, Sydney.

6 Cultural Perspectives on Work and Schoolwork in an Australian Inner-city Boys’ High School James Walker

‘Stokeham Boys High’ is an ethnically diverse ‘disadvantaged’ school in a crowded inner urban setting in Australia. During the 1980s, together with Christine Hunt, I conducted an ethnographic study of four groups of friends from this school, over a period of five years, starting from Year 10, a year in which students aged approximately 16 were candidates for the School Certificate, with which many would leave school. Contact was maintained through the next two years of schooling, up to the Higher School Certificate, the final exit point and through the transition from school into young adulthood, particularly working life. We used participant observation, recorded conversations and questionnaires, and interviewed the teachers of these students. We concentrated on the subcultures of the friendship groups and teachers. The major part of the study is reported in Louts and Legends (LL) and the present chapter can be seen as a supplement to that report, as well as an account which can be read in its own right. Culture at School The Year 10 population contained several prominent friendship/activity groups, some with marked cultural differences. The four selected were ‘the footballers’, a basically Anglo-Australian group which had absorbed individuals of other ethnic origins and whose major preoccupation was playing rugby for the school and local clubs and touch football in the school grounds; ‘the Greeks’, a group of second generation Greek Australians who were proud of their ethnicity and resented the Anglo or ‘Aussie’ presumption of cultural superiority; ‘the handballers’, a loosely knit group of quieter boys who gathered around the handball court as much for conversation as handball; and ‘the three friends’, a group of near outcasts who were stigmatized as ‘poofs’ for what was regarded by footballers, Greeks and some handballers as effeminate behavior and who resented the macho dominance of the footballers in particular. Other students also were interviewed, and a questionnaire administered to all Year 10. In analyzing the cultural patterns of each group and the intercultural relations between them we used a theory of ‘intercultural articulation’, which holds that a culture (or a subculture) is a set of dispositions to action characteristic of a group, constituting the group’s repertoire of behaviour and social practices. These dispositions articulate with those of other groups, joining the groups together in dynamic ways; they also articulate in the sense of speaking the underlying hypotheses and world views of the groups, its theories, which are enacted in its practices, including speech. The macho sexist culture of the footballers, for instance, articulated physically and symbolically with the culture of the three friends by oppressive behavior and implicit and explicit theories of gender and

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sexuality. It articulated with the Greeks’ culture through arrogant behaviour and the expression of racist views (LL Chs 4 and 5). In this chapter we examine the intercultural articulations between student and teacher cultures, noting the cultural basis for personal and social power, and the relation between cultural dynamics and social structure, especially the social structure of the school. A major theme is the cultural divergence between teachers and students which emerged in the performance of schoolwork, and its connection with social class backgrounds. One way teachers dealt with this divergence was to seek common ground or cultural convergence outside the classroom, especially in sporting activities, which were salient in the youth cultures of some groups, especially the footballers. Through quite deliberate strategies, as well as for some teachers a love of sport culturally convergent with that of students, they could draw elements to work with in what still remained the basic context of formal education, the classroom. This also gave some students additional ways of negotiating with teachers’ demands. Given the tension between the official objectives of formal education and the cultural context of Stokeham, however, the potentials of classroom teaching seemed quite limited to most teachers, even those tuned to some degree into youth culture. Indeed, some of those who were closely involved with school sport saw their cultural contact with the boys in sport as limited to establishment of friendly relations which could then be transferred to the classroom. This was perhaps an unnecessarily limited perspective, but it was based on a reasonable assumption: that in the classroom the Stokeham boys were confronted with culture fundamentally different from and in some respects in conflict with their own. Culture is not simply inherited, static and fixed; it is learned, dynamic and open to change. A basic aim of the teachers’ job was to persuade people to adopt the role of learner of another culture, to initiate them into its practices, especially its symbolic practices (language, etc.). This was perceived on both sides as a form of work: school-work (Woods, 1984), in which social class is an important cultural dimension. Class was experienced at Stokeham as part of one’s personal history, especially family background, and in the present as a set of concrete relations between the way of life of people doing different jobs; that is, as articulations between cultures related in different ways to the division of labour. Granted fundamental similarities between the four youth cultures’ responses to the professional middle-class culture of formal education, each group responded in distinctive ways, and individuals had to negotiate their careers within a framework of options, or a social structure, created by intercultural articulations on two axes: teacher culture/student culture, and student culture/student culture. But for all students in Year 10, because of the emphasis on issues connected with leaving school and looking for paid employment (‘real’ work) the processes of teaching and the curriculum came to centre on how the way of life of each individual student might be shaped by the future need to become a worker. Formal schooling offered one route to economic survival. To travel it one had to be a student. Because being a student was something which fitted ill with the local cultural context of Stokeham, teachers and students had to develop strategies for dealing with cultural divergence. Many of these were predicated on the assumed need to establish points of contact between the professional offerings of teachers and the present and likely future ends of students or, in the rhetoric of educational controversy, ‘relevance’. By far the most commonly claimed connection turned on the

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desirability of gaining the formal qualifications of schooling. When this credentialist argument failed to convince, further problems of control broke out. But the final issue was when to cease being a student, at least a high school student, and the year’s work and other activities led inexorably to the question of whether to leave or ‘go on’. For most teachers, too, being a teacher was something which, at least at first, fitted ill with the cultural context of Stokeham. Charged with implementing both a largely predesigned curriculum and with dealing with the particular responses of the Stokeham boys, their problems revolved around pursuing educational goals implicit in the curriculum in a way which either gained some real pedagogical purchase on their students’ responses or at least maintained their own authority in the school. We pursue these issues through an examination of teachers’ social class backgrounds, the cultural significance of schoolwork, students’ credentialist orientation to school, and the links between school and work. Culture Shock Teachers with Middle-class Backgrounds For nearly all Year 10 teachers, coming to Stokeham had been a difficult experience. The work ‘different’ was used many times to convey its quality; frequently social class was invoked to explain it. Teachers who could not cope either applied for transfer or were transferred at the request of their seniors on the ground that their inability to adapt was causing severe problems. Joan Woodburn was an Art teacher who had seen a colleague removed for this reason. CH: What exactly was the matter with her? Ms Woodburn: Well, she couldn’t change herself. She wouldn’t adapt to the school. You can’t just come to this school and try to do things just because you think they’re the right things to do; you can’t just come and try to change the school. Even if you’re here a long time you have to change yourself. You have to adapt yourself. Otherwise you don’t get anywhere with these kids. When teachers come here they get a terrific shock. It’s so great that they often get sick for instance: if there’s something going around they’ll just pick it up. CH: What kind of shock was it for you? Ms Woodburn: Well with me it was… I guess it’s culture shock. I come from a background where everything’s much the same, where everybody’s much the same. You look at the kids and you think on the surface that they all appear the same but they’re not; you quickly learn that people aren’t the same, things aren’t the same. CH: How did you have to change yourself? Ms Woodburn: I was very quiet and didn’t make a fuss about anything. I discovered that you have to put on a performance to get through to these kids. You have to entertain them. I’ve changed a lot. CH: Do you mean all the teachers at the school have faced this and have had to change themselves? Ms Woodburn: No, not all of them. Some don’t change of course. CH: How hard do you find that?

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Ms Woodburn: You just have to sit down and think things through, think out what to say to the kids. The Careers Adviser, Harry Playfair, associated the difference with the social class upbringing and status of staff in contrast to students. Mr Playfair: They are working-class, yes, and I am middle-class. So are just about all the teachers here. Most of them are from the North Side, and I’m from—! [well off suburb]. I mean (laughing) I have my own home, the way I dress… I don’t make any bones about it. That’s why it’s so difficult for me to … I find my job very difficult! I really do. CH: In this area. Mr Playfair: Yes. Because I don’t have any understanding. I mean, I don’t understand, you know, um…kids whose parents are not as caring perhaps as mine were, or who just don’t have the money to do those things. And they have different values. And to then try to guide kids, and to break away from that, it’s very difficult. The Careers Adviser, however, did not think the students would put a social class construction on the difference as experienced from their side. Mr Playfair: These kids are really different. You see them in the morning, you know, and they mightn’t have had breakfast or they might have had a belting. A boy mightn’t have the money for a book. I’d have to quietly give them a book. CH: Do the kids see teachers as different in the same way? Mr Playfair: I don’t think the kids see the teachers as of a different social class, but they obviously… certainly see us as, that we have an entirely different way of life. Teachers varied in the extent to which they thought they should try to get students to change their way of life, for instance to adopt ‘middle-class’ ways, as opposed to merely submitting to the official curriculum. No teacher, however, offered the view that teachers should change their way of life. Harry Playfair ‘made no bones’ about his preference for being middle-class, and Wendy Gould was frank in her view of the relative cultural merits of her class position. Ms Gould: I guess I really do think that in some ways I’m superior to the kids. I don’t know whether I like that, but I suppose I do accept that I’m superior, I’m middle-class. No teachers lived in the immediate locality. Very few had much contact with its residents and institutions outside school context. ‘Parents and Citizens’ meetings were sparsely attended by staff and parents. Yet some teachers, especially the Principal and the Careers Adviser, made sustained attempts to make local contact, especially with community and business leaders, and to involve them in aspects of school life. There was a marked reticence on the part of most parents to take part in, let alone intervene in, the operation of the school. The relative lack of mutual understanding between teachers on the one hand and parents and other locals on the other was a major feature of the social context. As form patron, Wendy Gould was responsible for maintaining contact with parents about their sons’ progress, needs and problems at school. Ms Gould: The way parents are involved now, it’s a negative thing really. You might have an emotional session with parents, they might ask you to keep them informed, for instance

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if a kid truants again. When you ring them up they’re offended. They’ve changed. They feel they’ve betrayed their kids. CH: A bit like school and teachers versus kids and parents. Ms Gould: Yes, like that. Parents only choose to contact the school if they see something wrong. They act as if it’s the ultimate authority, almost like a policeman. Teachers with Working-class Backgrounds Only two Year 10 teachers described themselves as coming from working-class backgrounds. Their approach to teaching at Stokeham was quite distinctive, as was their view of their colleagues. Mr Lever: I’ve known this school for twenty years. I didn’t come here, but I used to play football against them. So when all the old boys come back next year I’ll know half of ‘em just cause of that. CH: Do you think that makes a big difference in how you get along with the kids? Mr Lever: No. The only difference is how you are as a teacher. CH: But would you understand the kids and what they’re like? Mr Lever: I dunno if I understand ‘em that much. If I understood ‘em I’d probably be form master, but, yeah, I can relate to the kids. If the kids can’t relate to you—you’re goin’ a have a horrible time in this place. CH: And you think that happens with some teachers? Mr Lever: Definitely. They can’t relate to their kids…at all. They come here 9 to 3 and go home. They might do lesson preparation, but they still only come here 9 to 3. See, teaching is not just teaching in the classroom. I have a lot more to do with some of the kids outside, I reckon. For sure. Every lunchtime in the ground; training for cricket or just walking around and talk to the kids. CH: You think that’s really important. Mr Lever: Gotta be. CH: Is that the most important thing about teaching? Mr Lever: Sure. John Lever, who taught Maths, claimed no superiority as a teacher in virtue of his working-class background. He did not claim to ‘understand’ the students better. Nor, unlike Harry Playfair, did he see ‘understanding’ as a serious problem; he simply acknowledged that his class background made it easier for him to ‘relate’ to them. Part of this was his experience in working-class occupations; not that he thought of class as related to occupations: rather, he differentiated between people in terms of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ and substituted, for the category ‘class’, the regional category of where a person lived. This sense of the importance of ‘where you live’, whether or not it was seen as incompatible with thinking in class terms, was shared by most teachers and students. Mr. Lever: I feel that not enough teachers have had enough experience on all sorts of skills plus their own life experience they go through. I’ve worked at pubs, the airport, cleaning, driving cars, garages… I’ve done everything and I think if you meet a lot of people you could just realize that the world’s made up of a lot of different people, and you can’t put tags on people.

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CH: Like class tags? Mr Lever: You can’t put class tags. You’ve got good and bad North Siders, good and bad from the outer suburbs, good and bad beach people, so what you feel when some teachers say to me things like ‘Oh well, I come from a middle-class background and these kids are working-class so I don’t really understand them’…well maybe they’re copping out. Kath Morrish, a Social Science teacher, on the other hand, was explicitly proud of her working-class background, and found in it a point of contact with her students, identifying unlike Harry Playfair, what she took to be a corresponding class pride in them. CH:

How do they show they’re proud of being working-class apart from coming from Stokeham? Mr Morrish: You mention it—I mean, the way I did to you—there was no reason for me to mention it. CH: Just come out with it? Mr Morrish: That’s right. You soon let people know. A lot of them like to show they’re real tough: ‘We’re tough; we come from a hard life’. A lot of it’s exaggerated. CH: I suppose a lot of it is pretty tough? They have some pretty tough situations to get through sometimes? Mr Morrish: So do other…all kids, don’t they? CH: You said some of them are really friendly. Mr Morrish: You can get to know them. Others you could strangle, literally. But the good thing is that you don’t have any problems. See, there’s one group of kids I’ve been teaching for three years: you know it’s easy, you can sit them down for a period and you can talk about anything. You can really stir them up. CH: It really helps to get to know the kids that closely over a period of time? Ms Morrish: Oh yeah, it’s good for you ‘Good Teaching’: Cultural Convergence and Divergence ‘Not having any problems’, avoiding ‘hassles’, ‘getting through the day’, having trouble-free relationships with students, were among the criteria most commonly offered by teachers for successful teaching. They did not preclude evaluation of teaching by criteria of levels of academic achievement, or producing more thoroughly ‘socialized’ or ‘mature’ students, but given the cultural gulf they tended to be seen as worthwhile ends in themselves. They were regarded as real achievements, marks of a competent teacher, not merely preconditions for working towards further, more genuinely educational goals, as might be the case in a middle-class school. Teachers successful in these terms did not necessarily see themselves as settling for mere peaceful accommodation, sheer survival, or ‘getting through the day’, irrespective of whether ‘education’ was proceeding, although some did. On the contrary, they were implicitly acknowledging a fundamental point about learning: where there is cultural divergence, if people have to live together they must, even if coercion is used, learn how to do so, that they can do this more effectively or less effectively, and that the process involved is intercultural articulation. It is not as if, in formal education, there are two completely distinct processes, first establishing the conditions for learning and then getting learning under way.

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There is just learning, and both teachers and students have to do it. As Joan Woodburn put it, at Stokeham ‘you quickly learn that people aren’t the same’, that ‘you have to adapt yourself. This said, it should also be stressed that the appointed task of all teachers, whatever their personal family and social class background, was to get the students to learn certain specific things, to guide their development in certain directions and, as teachers, to adapt themselves to that end. The teachers’ culture was the authoritative one, and when teacher/student showdowns were inevitable, in their professional eyes the legitimate one, which should override the other. In the eyes of the students this legitimacy had either to be accepted or rejected. This asymmetry is at the bottom of power relations in schooling. Within it, the teacher culture at Stokeham was viewed by all students as belonging to another social group, whether or not they aspired to belong to that group themselves. When students perceived differences among teachers, it was always within this framework Unlike articulations between peer cultures, then, teacher-student interactions were not, officially, relations between equals. However much youth cultural interaction produced cultural development and even change in individuals, this was not the overriding end of any of the peer cultures, whereas because teachers were in a position of formal authority over students, it was the raison d’être of teacher culture. Whatever the cultural differences among teachers, each teacher sub-culture contained strategies to stimulate cultural development and change in students. Teachers at Stokeham, whether they liked it or not, were in the business of intercultural articulation. They were professionals in cultural development and, when student cultures clashed with their own, ideally of cultural change, though they might, on occasion, have to settle for accommodation. When teacher and student cultures harmonize, and when there is substantive continuity between them, whatever differences there might be in age, gender and ethnicity, formal educators seldom need aim beyond promoting students’ cultural development, extending the repertoire of dispositions students bring to school. Where there is no serious cultural divergence and students find the curriculum and their teachers’ advice and instruction culturally convergent, cultural change is not called for. What has to be learned is new, but not alien. Formal education, in such cases, is a process of cultural extension, growing from an initial cultural convergence in which teachers’ strategies mesh with students’ existing problem solving procedures established in the family and the community. Parents will usually have an understanding of the formal educational culture, convergent in relevant aspects with teachers’ understanding, reflecting education’s role in assisting parents and teachers to their respective places in the division of labour. There is a set of common goals, values and strategies for pursuing the goals in accordance with values already established in the cultural history of the social group. There are certain qualifications we need to make, however. In middle-class schools there is of course a variety of students, not all of whose parents have ‘professional’ occupations similar to teachers. Some students have parents in business activities whose values and problems do not converge so closely with the professional culture of the teachers and whereas they value credentials might not share all the ‘academic’ values of teachers. Their children are likely to be externally related to teacher culture in ways similar to the Stokeham boys, albeit with a more refined appreciation of the payoff of ‘hard work’ at school. And, to be sure, any student, of whatever class background, can find the ‘hard work’ a grind, imposed by teachers. The middle class is no more culturally monolithic than was the Stokeham working class. In the limiting case teachers and

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students might belong to the same sub-group, when the student comes from an academic family. Cultural continuity is a matter of degree, but there clearly are cases when in concrete activity both students and teachers find continuity of practice to be central and competition peripheral. Stokeham was not such a case. Cultural divergence between teachers and students was usually central, and practical continuity peripheral. If there was to be serious pursuit of official educational goals, cultural change had to head the agenda. But change not only requires learning, it also requires flexibility in ways that purely developmental learning does not. Cultural divergence does not always entail competition. In a competition there are winners and losers. Competitors are contestants for scarce resources: culturally, for status, power and privilege. Even if by consent and with the conviction that competition has social advantages, competing individuals have a conflict of interest. They cannot all achieve their goals. As a problem-solving procedure, competition distributes solutions unequally. Such cultural competition occurred both between youth cultures and between youth cultures and teachers’ professional culture. There was also subcultural competition within teacher culture. The overall professional culture at Stokeham contained several subcultures, forms of teachers’ occupational culture (Hargreaves, 1980), based primarily on faculty staffrooms: Mathematics; Science; Industrial Arts; English; History and Languages; Art and Music; Physical Education; and Social Science. The staffrooms, in turn, reflected the ‘subject communities’ typical of secondary schools, which form bases for collective action (Ball and Lacey, 1982). They also tended to be associated with a range of perspectives on the curriculum, or even educational philosophies. Maths, Science and Industrial Arts staff were prone to describe most of the Social Science and Art staff as ‘radicals’; the Social Science staff mostly described themselves as ‘progressives’ and those teaching Maths and Science as ‘conservatives’ or ‘traditionalists’. In between, English, History and Language staff were less homogeneous in educational philosophy, and perhaps as a result showed less group cohesion. The Physical Education staff seemed to defy classification from the curriculum point of view, though they were ‘traditionalist’ in their approach to ‘discipline’. At Stokeham, educational philosophy was more than a profession of faith; it was quite closely linked to goals and practice. Philosophical differences were discernibly reflected in divergences of individual, and collective or subject community, strategy. Although most staff subscribed to the school’s policy, strongly emphasized by the Principal, of ‘socializing’ the boys, only the Social Science staff, under subject master Barry King, worked this into a unified collective approach to the curriculum. Traditional’ staff tended to pursue the policy as a separate objective alongside straightforward instruction in subject matter, rather than as a set of principles for selecting and organizing content. They also supported its promotion through sport more than other teachers did. The ‘progressives’ were more likely to be ‘anti-sport’, opposing a strong emphasis on sport at the expense of other school activities, or as a major way of pursuing school policy, although in practice they had to make considerable concessions. Teachers spoke of themselves as being ‘pro’ or ‘anti’ sport. Interestingly, it did not appear that ‘progressives’ were more likely than ‘traditionalists’ to want to be more personally familiar with students, more friendly, or to try to be ‘equals’ with them. Educational philosophy was much more closely associated with curriculum approaches than with differences in approach to pedagogy or evaluation.

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The Social Science, Art and Music faculties were predominantly female, many either espousing feminism or having it attributed to them; Maths, Science and Industrial Arts staff predominantly male, with remaining staff almost evenly divided by gender. The staff spectrum, then, more or less ranged between female, ‘progressive’, ‘anti-sport’, Social Science teachers and male, ‘traditional’, ‘pro-sport’ Maths, Science and Industrial Arts teachers. A woman, the form patron, was in charge of the ‘welfare’ of Year 10; men, the Deputy Principal and the Sportsmaster, were responsible for enforcing discipline. To the extent that teachers shared each other’s company outside school hours, subject communities tended to stick together, going to separate pubs for example. To summarize, we can locate the problems faced by teachers, and students in their interaction with teachers, on four main axes: social class background, the present professional/client (teacher/ student) relationship, age, and gender. These intersecting axes ran through various sub-cultures associated, especially at the extremes, with staffrooms and subject communities. In practice, intercultural articulation tended to focus on the professional axis—teacher/student. In some cases age differences were more important; in other cases it was gender; in others the subject being taught; but chiefly what was prominent was the professional authority and culture of the teachers in comparison with the ‘uneducated’ dependency of the boys. In practice the intergenerational dimension, adult/child, and the professional dimension, teacher/ student, were precisely coextensive. Youth cultures at the school were student cultures, and adult cultures were professional cultures. Both were occupational cultures mapping onto distinct age groups and contained latent social class perspectives, rooted in latent cultures (Lacey, 1977). In practice it was very difficult for people clearly to perceive these elements as distinct, let alone to conceive of disentangling and rearranging them. For students, it was next to impossible, and this profoundly affected their attitude to curriculum, pedagogy and evaluation, to their position in the political economy of schoolwork. Schoolwork The Relative Autonomy of the School Stokeham teachers were divided, and some were personally ambivalent, on the question of linking the school’s practices more tightly to the labour market. Year 10 students were almost unanimously preoccupied with the relation between schooling and their job prospects. While some teachers thought a vocational orientation could compromise the pursuit of other educational objectives, students tended not so much to see such goals as conflicting but to object to ‘pressure’ being put upon them to worry about employment. Teachers and students seemed to agree, however, that the relation between school and work was far from a close one. School was by and large experienced as a world on its own, to which you brought your own purposes, generated, constrained and empowered as they were by cultural resources concentrated elsewhere. Stokeham Boys High was perceived, to put it in technical terms, as a ‘relatively autonomous’ institution (Bernstein, 1977:189– 90). There are good reasons to agree with this assessment. In modern industrial societies the authoritative substance of professional teacher culture derives from the control of the institutions of

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‘symbolic power’, especially the education system, by members of the ‘new middle class’, within which teachers are a large, but relatively low status sub-group. The ‘new middle class’ has arisen from increasing use of scientific knowledge in the economy, and from the ‘scientific’ or ‘professional’ organization of work, both of which have involved increasing numbers of more highly educated people. As this social group has grown, it has developed its own culture, reflected in its own kinds of social practice, based in the work of leaders in the arts and sciences, the educational system, medical and social services, the mass media, the legal system and to some extent the government bureaucracies. It is both the product and the sponsor of expansion in those fields, especially education. These fields, moreover, comprise the kind of work it understands, and the kinds of work for which its credentialing practices are best suited (Bernstein, 1977:Ch. 6). The general culture of these social strata (despite certain differences and conflicts of interest) is latent in the professional occupational culture of teachers, mediated through personal dispositions and the technical practices of teacher culture—curriculum, pedagogy and evaluation. It therefore indirectly contributes to structuring options facing schoolworkers—teachers and students. When teachers run into difficulty in their work, because they ‘don’t understand these kids’, they are bumping into a different culture which tends to structure options differently and which also contributes to structuring options for teachers and students. The test of their competence as teachers lies in management of the articulation between their culture and the ‘different’ one. Culture, as sets of dispositions to behaviour, condensing into recognizable social practices, determines social structures (LL:30–35). Social structures are not outside cultures; they are not external objects which determine culture. On the contrary, they are the very pattern of articulation, the forms of jointedness and communication between cultures, and these articulations are always patterns of behaviour, in which individuals choose what to do. The choices made by individuals are both empowered and constrained directly by their own cultures and those with which they come into contact, and indirectly by further patterns of articulation between the latter and other cultures with which they may have no direct contact. The choices are between options, and the available options are determined by direct and mediated intercultural articulation. The set of options, always embedded in immediate and mediated social relations, are the only social structures that exist. Although through processes of cultural transmission in, for example, the family, the school and the workplace, these structures or sets of options are passed on through the generations, there is nothing necessary about them. They are historical, contingent, and changeable. As social structures, then, the school and the class system are sets of behavioural possibilities arising from existing intercultural articulations, the movements of the joints and the communications between individual and collective agents joined together in social life. Thus the problem of trying to analyze some putatively problematic relation between agency and structure (Giddens, 1979; Giroux, 1983) need not arise (Walker, 1985). Some structures are very tight: they comprise very few options. Given the legal system, for instance, of which the law requiring attendance at school is a part, students must attend or risk the consequences. The articulations between youth culture and the culture of teachers and law enforcement groups are relatively ‘tight-jointed’ here. There is not much room for manoeuvre. Other structures are looser, comprising wider options. The formal educational structure itself is compatible with a variety of types of school and various degrees of autonomy for teachers. The articulation between teacher cultures and the economy on the one hand and student culture on the other are

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relatively ‘loose jointed’, leaving more room for individual choice, cultural change, and therefore structural change. Structural change, or changes in certain social relations, on this account consists in changes in intercultural articulation. Although there are no essential, or invariant social structures, structures are of course intergenerationally transmitted through the learning of dispositions and the framing of options. So when we speak of the relative autonomy of schools, we recognize the loose jointedness of the link between schools and other social institutions, always remembering that the joints in the structures are nothing other than intercultural connections, articulations, allowing rather more or rather less freedom of movement, more or fewer options. And when we speak of social, or structural, change, we recognize that this means nothing other than change in human behaviour in intercultural articulation arising from cultural change and realignment. Stratification and Differentiation Stokeham Boys High was structurally complex. On the one hand the basic, and official, structural patterns were stratified (Bernstein, 1977:Ch. 2). Teachers were in authority, their roles distinct from students’, and categorized according to their subject specializations and seniority. Students were categorized by age (into ‘forms’ or ‘years’), by subject classes (Maths, etc.) and by ability as interpreted from academic achievement. Stratification was designed so that if it was to be held together there needed to be authority and privilege, and the use of punishments and rewards. Rituals like assemblies and particular ways of ‘lining up’ and approaching staff were imposed by adults, by teachers. On the other hand, because of the profound cultural divergences, there was a tendency for teachers to try to treat students as individuals who were different, and to allow for relationships based on recognition of such differences. A second, largely informal, and differentiated structure, allowing for individual difference, cut across the formal stratification. An emphasis on personal communication or ‘understanding’ and cooperation or ‘relating’ allowed much more room for youth cultures to assert their practices as acceptable options. The sporting culture, dominated by the footballers, was joined to teacher culture in school sport, producing a degree of school unity and solidarity (LL:Ch. 3). Teachers, especially the sportsmaster, attempted to weave this differentiated structure into the basic social stratification, notably via the adult-imposed ritual of the assembly. The effect was in part to legitimate the extension of the power of the dominant youth cultures into further contexts of school life, as individually achieved status (from sporting involvement) moved alongside and even contested the importance of positionally ascribed privilege (from teacher roles). Grade sportsmen could occasionally defeat teachers’ wishes by insisting they had to be absent from class, and in some case by frustrating teachers’ attempts to curtail bullying. A further, more formal move to differentiation could be seen in the attempts of some Social Science staff to acknowledge and draw upon students’ cultural backgrounds in designing curricula and conducting classroom discussions. Both the sporting and the curricular move to differentiated structures, to more open patterns of intercultural articulation, had the effect of opening up the school somewhat to cultural forces from the outside community. This made it just a little less of a ‘closed school’ (Bernstein, 1977:Ch. 3), in two respects. First, internally it broke down strict boundaries between what would otherwise have

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been distinct compartments of subject matter, at least within Social Science—the ‘Living Skills’ course was the clearest example of this. Second, it softened some of the boundaries between the formal school culture and external cultural patterns or, in Bernstein’s terms, the ‘classification’ between the school and other social contexts. In so doing it slightly changed the power relations of the school, giving students more influence in determination of what was legitimate schoolwork. It allowed a modicum of structural change in intercultural articulation. Yet, overall, and probably because class differences made it difficult for teachers to get into close and penetrating articulation with student cultures, the pedagogical relationship was formal and hierarchical, with teacher culture determining the distinctions between teacher and student roles, the rules governing the sequence of learning in the classroom and the procedures for evaluating students, activities and curriculum content. Hierarchy, sequencing rules and evaluative criteria are here regarded as the three basic features of the pedagogic relationship (Bernstein, 1977:117). It was not as easy as it might have been in a middle-class school for teachers implicitly to assume aspects of students’ cultural backgrounds in deciding what to teach and how to transmit or present it. Teachers maintained a high degree of control over these processes or, in Bernstein’s terms, control over ‘framing’. This also meant that for successful teaching teachers had to be very clear and explicit with students about what was expected and accepted. Their pedagogy was highly ‘visible’. Most points of contact with student culture tended to be external to curriculum content (except for physical education), through sport and, as Cath Morrish put it, ‘entertaining these kids’. (See Bernstein’s distinction between ‘collection codes’ and ‘integrated codes’.) Students, too, tended to assess teachers—as teachers—in terms suggested by teacher culture. They commented unfavourably on teachers who could not control the class, and footballers in particular were not impressed by those who could not hold their own in humorous contests. JW: You don’t like any of them? Fred: Nah, not really. Too easy to get on top of them. Mr Backman, he’s the best teacher in the school. JW: Why is he the best? Fred: ‘e knows how to get on with the kids. What to say to them. Like, if someone plays a joke on ‘im, ‘e can play one back, and ‘ave a laugh. Everyone laughs. Sometimes other teachers try, but they can’t do it. JW: So a teacher has to succeed, not just try to be funny? Fred: Yeah, that’ right. JW: What about Mr Furniss? Fred: Yeah, he’s OK. ‘e’s the best English teacher. Him and Mr Backman know how to turn a joke around. Anthony was representative of many students who appreciated teachers who could explain things clearly, and who did not confuse them about what was expected. Anthony: I think Miss Tolson’s good. Like, y’always understand ‘er the first time she says it? She can make it simple, ‘n’ y’ know what she wants. Yet these assessments need to be seen in the light of a more fundamental attitude to the teacher’s role. Transcript and questionnaire data reveal that the basic criteria applied by students derived from views of the quality of the student-teacher relationship, which included both professional and

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interpersonal elements. Students resented being treated ‘like dirt’ or ‘like little kids’. Sixty-five percent defined a ‘good teacher’ in terms such as ‘helpful’, ‘understanding’, ‘patient’, ‘friendly’, ‘easy to get on with’ and 60 percent defined a ‘bad teacher’ as ‘impatient’, ‘unhelpful’, ‘too strict’, ‘unfriendly’, ‘unfair’, ‘mean’, ‘violent’, ‘shout and yell’, ‘think they’re better’, and ‘big boss’. These responses need to be distinguished from perceptions of teachers who strive to be liked by students. Although they appreciated teachers who could share a joke, or talk about sport, music, or ‘what you did on the weekend’, students did not appreciate teachers who, when trying to communicate what students perceived as legitimate educational knowledge (as defined by teacher culture) could not communicate clearly or who seemed, in their effort to be liked by the students, to step outside the conventional pedagogical relationship in ways that suggested to the boys that teachers were open to exploitation. Responses to the ‘young Art teacher’ illustrated both points. Ms Woodburn: You just have to sit down and think things through, think out what to say to the kids. CH: And the young Art teacher couldn’t do that. Ms Woodburn: No she couldn’t. She was all airy fairy, which was great but you just can’t do that sort of thing. Like what we’ve done is to get the videos, the films and that kind of thing, and we’ve worked out new ways of doing things with the kids. I mean she’d be teaching them about El Greco or something and they’d be taking the window apart. At the same time, from the boy’s point of view, she allowed them to interpret her behaviour as sexually provocative: they claimed she would respond to both verbally and physically suggestive behaviour on their part and would herself flirt with them. On one occasion she had to be rescued from being mobbed in the playground by whistling and catcalling students. Although she was trying to be liked and respond to their culture, she hadn’t thought it through. This happened to no other female teacher in the course of the research. All had learned not to tolerate even the slightest suggestion of sexuality in their relationships with the boys. John Lever commented that teachers had to develop ‘the resources and whatever it is that’s needed to back up their ideas of keeping them [students] in line’. CH: Do female teachers tend to lack that? Mr Lever: The female teachers on the whole are pretty good. We lost one incredibly good one last term. CH: What did she teach? Mr Lever: English. A little lady. When she first…she had everything that you’d expect a teacher to fail in discipline and yet it worked exactly the opposite, and she was tremendous. She never raised her voice, never did anything, never hit them with a cane, had kids eating out of her hand. Incredible… In fact there’d be no difference in the percentage of male or female who—in my opinion only—who don’t seem to have control of the children… But then again try coming in and instituting the, uh, Gestapo method and you’d probably be eaten alive. CH: What, in this school? Mr Lever: Yes. The kids just…‘cause there’s not enough other teachers doing the same thing. The kids just wouldn’t respond to it. Female teachers faced special problems in articulating their role and values to the sexist culture dominant among the boys. Whether or not the stereotype ‘little lady’ is desirable, the boys tended to divide women into the respectable and the disreputable, and treat them accordingly, just as they

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tended to divide men into ‘real men’ and ‘poofs’. For some ethnic groups, notably the Turkish, there was resistance to the very idea that women could be teachers: their place was strictly domestic. Women teachers found breaking down this resistance a long, hard and often only partly successful process. Similar problems faced the only female teacher of Industrial Arts, viewed by the boys as an essentially male subject. She was, however, strongly—and proudly—supported by her male colleagues. Learning, Conservatism and Simplicity If John Lever’s opinion about there needing to be enough teachers ‘doing the same thing’ is correct, and I think it is, with two qualifications I shall mention, it supports an important generalization about learning: people find anomalies, exceptions and counter-examples disturbing, and will try to avoid adjusting to accommodate them. People strive for coherence in their experience, and will resist particular threats to that coherence. One principle they follow here is cultural conservatism. Having accepted, for example, that teacher culture defines what counts as educational knowledge and ability, as good teaching, students will, whether or not they find these interesting or relevant to the problems they face outside their roles as students, treat exceptions to the dominant teacher culture as illegitimate. (There can of course be more than one dominant teacher culture, so long as each succeeds in dominating its own field, so long as the boundaries are kept clear.) There are limits, though, to cultural conservatism, where we must make two qualifications to this generalization about learning. First, people may feel forced to concede to an anomaly, and even revise their program, when the anomaly exposes serious incoherence in their own program, incoherence systematically related to their practice. The second qualification concerns the possibility of recontextualizing the anomaly, of fitting it into another context where it serves to achieve some of the goals of your own culture. There is another principle of cultural learning operating here, lying behind these qualifications: what we might call cultural simplicity. People may review their programs if they find they can increase problem-solving power by uniting under one idea what previously they have regarded as two different, even opposing ideas, and they may change their attitudes and practices accordingly. Conservatism and simplicity, clearly, are quite different principles, and it would be of great benefit to show how particular cultures tend to arbitrate between them. At present, it seems, we know little, in general, about this. But we can see how they fit into the theory of intercultural articulation, which suggests that a culture is implicitly hypothetical, a theory of the world and the cultural agent’s (whether individual or group) place in it (LL:Ch. 2). In developing their theories, agents will be more effective in achieving their goals and solving their problems if they maximize prediction, if they correctly anticipate situations and how to act effectively in them. They develop their theories through practical observation and experimentation, correcting, revising and extending their conceptions of themselves and others, and here the guiding principles are simplicity and conservatism. People tend to prefer the simpler correction unless there is a more conservative alternative, a less drastic departure from their present theory. But a big simplification, desirable because of its practical power, may warrant a fairly drastic departure. We have genuine interests in both simplicity and conservation, which are interrelated under the general rule of maintaining

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coherence, of ‘keeping our act together’. (This argument is based on the epistemology of W.V. Quine (1974:137).) A Legendary Teacher Bob Horlick was Harry Playfair’s predecessor as Careers Adviser. Regrettably, neither Christine Hunt nor I had the opportunity to meet him, as he had transferred before our research began. In a way, however, this enhanced his legendary status, and we were confronted with a reputation pure and simple, with recollections, representations and possibly reconstruction of a person who had had a great impact on those who knew him at Stokeham, especially students. What is important is not simply his legendary status, but that he was highly regarded as a teacher, not just as a ‘good bloke’, despite his apparently having been completely unconventional in the Stokeham context, both professionally and personally—almost a complete anomaly in terms of the dominant teacher cultures. When in conversations I asked students what they thought made a good teacher the usual response was to mention individual teachers. Further questioning was required to ascertain why they were good. Most reasons given cohered with teacher culture as understood by students: ability to control students and so on, but with a profound recognition that teachers were supposed to be there for the good of the students and should care about them. These characteristics assumed the authority of teacher culture and its superiority in the school context. So many students, from all groups, spontaneously made Mr Horlick their first nomination that I decided to ask all Year 10 students who nominated someone else or mentioned no individual, ‘What about Mr Horlick? Was he a good teacher?’ There was unanimity; all agreed that he was. One thing stood out: they were convinced that he was genuinely interested in them. But beyond that it proved very difficult to get students to be specific about why he was a good teacher. None of the other points about control, clear explanation and unambiguous expectations were mentioned. People were unsure about what were the relevant criteria in his case. It was possible, however, for students to recall what he did or, rather, what they did together. The following is reasonably representative of many conversations. Fred: JW: Chopper: Blackjack: JW: Omar: Mosey: Omar: Mosey: JW: Mosey: Murph: Omar: Chopper:

I dunno, we just sorta used’a sit around ‘n’ talk. What did you talk about? (Several seconds silence). I used to talk to ‘im about playin’ the guitar. [Mr Horlick could play]. ’n’ ’e knew about tennis. But did ‘e teach you about jobs? Oh yeah, there was jobs… But, like…idn’t really teach y’anything about it… …he used to have lots of jobs before ‘e was a teacher. …y’ know, ‘e never made y’ learn anything or make y’ study about it. Didn’t you have to read stuff about jobs? Yeah, but y’ didn’t have to. ‘e was good, y’ know, like y’ could talk about anything ‘n’ ‘e didn’ mind. Hey Jim, Mr Horlick, he was a hippy! Fuckin’ hippy clothes, long hair—y’ know?

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Attitudes to hippy culture were generally negative. Most footballers were contemptuous of it and it was generally alien to the Stokeham context. Male hippies and their clothes were known as ‘JC’ (Jesus Christs) and weren’t far from ‘poofs’. But Mr Horlick made no personal concessions; he expected respect for his identity. Mosey: You know everyone used to knock him because ‘e was a hippy, but like… say, ‘Listen, I’m not gunna fuck around with you kids, piss off!’ Y’ know? Pappo: ‘e did ‘is job. In students’ responses to Mr Horlick’s hippy culture, cultural simplicity won out over conservatism. His practice seemed to have rendered aspects of personal style, as well as his deviation from the norms of dominant teacher cultures, irrelevant, to have succeeded in getting students to overlook his doubly anomalous characteristics. Other teachers’ differences in personal and cultural styles such as dress were still conventional in the eyes of the students, in that they fitted within what was expected for teachers. Mr Horlick was also regarded as a good teacher by his colleagues in the Social Science staff. Despite the students’ perception that he had not set out to teach them anything in particular, according to Wendy Gould he certainly had. In fact, he had launched the Living Skills program at Stokeham. Ms Gould: Living Skills at that stage was a fairly new concept in education. Bob was very very keen, he actually asked to become a Careers Adviser, he didn’t do it because he was having a hard time as an Economics teacher for example, he was respected as a good teacher on the staff. He did it I think because he genuinely felt that the job needed to exist, he was keen to undertake that kind of resource work for kids, and I think he had a genuine feeling for kids and their future. And I think too—and I’m guessing here—that he possibly felt he could do more for the average kid in our school here by taking on something to do with careers resources and Living Skills as such rather than staying on as a straight Economics teacher, where he was really only ever catering to the academic section of the population. That’s my guess, anyway, knowing his personality. Mr Horlick, it seems, has definite educational objectives, prepared thoroughly, had assembled a stock of resources on the employment situation generally and, mainly through arranging work experience, had established many contacts in the local community. What he also appears to have done was spend a lot of time learning, from ‘the average kids’, about their interests, aspirations and perspectives on work and schoolwork. If we assume that the students also learned from him, the fact that they did so while not seeing themselves as learning nor him as teaching is probably explained by his having learned how to get on the inside of their culture, to latch right into their own learning programs. However, despite their not seeing it as a teaching/learning process, they somehow accepted what he did as falling within the legitimate role of a teacher. In terms of our earlier discussion of social structure in curriculum and pedagogy, Mr Horlick had moved to a differentiated structure and a loosely framed pedagogical style which was producing a continuity of cultural development. He was managing to get students’ differences to order his thoroughly prepared subject matter, or ‘resources’, and to contribute to the framing of options in the classroom. Although the words ‘teaching’ and ‘learning’ remained associated with more conventional, stratified, teacher culture, the students’ programs implicitly recognized valuable knowledge and skills were being acquired. What was anomalous in terms of the teacher culture was

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not at all anomalous in the cultures of the students. The intercultural articulation was penetrating and substantial and conducted on the basis of his first learning their language, something he was able to do because of their respect for his sincerity and ‘caring’ about them. Other teachers who succeeded in ‘understanding these kids’ retained the distinct, authoritative teacher role, and used their understanding in a general way to manage that role effectively and to negotiate what they regarded as reasonable agreements and arrangements with kids. For them, a degree of distance made teaching easier; for instance, in discussion of a student who was unhappy about staying at school in Year 11 (second year of the study): Ms Tolson: I like to keep out of it, I don’t want to know about it. Teachers don’t have the right to pry into a kid’s background. I like to know a bit up to a certain point. CH: What’s the certain point? Ms Tolson: Um, well, take X, he’s a kid, I know he’s unhappy so I make allowances. The kids tell you stories about him, but I’d rather not know. If a kid wants to talk, that’s different. It’s easier for me to deal with the kids and the kids with me if we’re in set roles. Close relationships are the exception, but you can’t have that sort of relationship with all kids. X, a Greek-Australian student, was unhappy because of increasing tension with his parents who, like most Greek-Australian parents, were keen for their son to ‘go on‘to the Higher School Certificate and seek a white collar job. X, like many other Greek-Australian boys, indeed like most Stokeham boys, found senior high school work extremely hard and was losing confidence that he could satisfy his parents’ aspirations. Anglo-Australian parents, having attended Australian schools, were more likely to understand this, and less likely to have such aspirations in the first place. The external evidence of X’s ethnic cultural problem, his ‘unhappiness’ at school, could be dealt with, in Ms Tolson’s pedagogical style, only in a counselling mode, it was not brought into the substance of her pedagogy, as it probably would have been into Bob Horlick’s. Gender differences may determine different responses to the same strategy employed by female teachers on the one hand and males on the other. Ms Tolson did not necessarily have the same options as Mr Horlick. Teachers like Meg Tolson, a Social Science teacher who got on well with students, who sought to manage classroom business basically in their own terms and set students the task of mastering those terms, rendered the teaching/learning process, in a context of cultural divergence, much more explicitly one of negotiation, especially on the students’ side, than did Bob Horlick. The interplay between teachers and students in which each party tried to maximize their own interest became a more conscious and deliberate one. Teaching remained a matter of intercultural articulation, of developing, revising and supplementing students’ existing dispositions, but those dispositions had to be activated and developed more through students’ negotiation with an external cultural perspective. Cultural divergence remained unless students came to identify positively with the class culture latent in teachers’ perspectives. The mechanisms disposing students to ‘work’ or ‘try hard’ derived from their perceptions of the culturally external, instrumental value of schoolwork—credentialism, or keeping out of trouble with teachers—rather than from internally validated pursuit of goals and perspectives within the practices of their own culture. The process was one of adaptation rather than extension. Where such cultural divergence persisted, as it did for most Stokeham students throughout their school careers, it meant that students had to devise strategies for negotiating an acceptable, if not

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culturally preferable, relationship of ‘working consensus’ (Woods, 1980:130; Pollard, 1979:89) with teachers, within which each party could to some extent pursue their own interests. We have examined the major interests of teachers at Stokeham, tracing them, through the professional teacher cultures, back to a latent class perspective on schooling. What were students’ interests, and how did they relate to differences in class? The answer requires a look at the interaction between class, gender and ethnicity in youth cultures in the school context, in youth cultures as student cultures. Good Results Responses of the Four Groups to Formal Education The general point to be emphasized is that gender and ethnicity produced differentials in class identifications and aspirations which, as I have argued, need to be analyzed as differences in cultural practice and in the framing of options. Taking gender first, although all students commenced from a class cultural background which diverged from teacher culture, the three friends, in reaction against macho culture, and via an identification with the arts, especially theatre, aspired to a more cultivated and ‘mature’ way of life which they saw as opposed to macho ‘ocker’. Implicitly, they were disposed to convergence with teacher culture, and disapproved of concession made to the ‘stupid’ and ‘unfair’ youth cultures around them. They had mixed with members of the ‘new middle class’ in theatrical circles and aspired to belong, as adults, in those circles. Their motivation for sticking to the ‘hard work’ of school was not simply credentialist, although this was as important a consideration for them as for all who ‘stayed on’. Their relation to teacher culture was not purely external and instrumental; they had internalized some of its central values. If they desired to do well at school, the reason was not, as it was for many of the Greeks and footballers, to prove their superiority; they valued achievement as much for the intrinsic satisfaction it could give. Unfortunately, this cultural convergence came a little late in their school careers, and none of them was successful in the Higher School Certificate. The three, then, did not need to be openly and explicitly negotiated with for them to apply themselves to schoolwork. (One of them created problems for teachers by truanting: to avoid taunting, not schoolwork.) All the same, they might have been more academically successful had teachers tried more to get on the inside of their distinctive culture. The responses of members of the Greek group to formal education were more diverse. Their ethnic background made them intensively competitive, especially against the Aussies. There were short term status rewards in competing successfully at school, in whatever context. But ethnically inspired academic competitiveness also had a long term aspect. This had an external, instrumental, credentialist element for all the Greeks: their parents were keen that they move into ‘better jobs’. The second generation should move beyond the menial work the first had undertaken, usually with great sacrifices, precisely so that their sons should, through upward mobility, avoid repeating the experience. Long term, too, parents and sons wanted to do well as Greeks in Australia. But because of the class background of their parents the Greek boys, too, started from a culturally divergent position.

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Only some of them emulated the three in moving to cultural convergence, and some did this earlier than others. Dion had a well worked out plan for becoming a ‘professional person’ and perceived the teachers’ culture as a model for mature, adult responsibility (LL:Ch. 4). In Years 11 and 12 he enthusiastically became one of its agents as a prefect, then as school captain. Part of the explanation may be that his family had had particular success in business, owning several shops, one of which was a restaurant/takeaway food business in a prosperous middle-class suburb, and that Dion was acquainted with ‘professional people’ other than teachers. He was also a socially and intellectually talented person. His friend Manny, who in topping the form had, as his friend Philip delighted to point out, ‘given the Australians the shits’, had done well academically throughout high school. Although his family lived in the heart of Stokeham, his parents apparently had a greater familiarity with the internal values of education than other Greeks. Both Dion and Manny were distancing themselves from cultural forms which hampered their success with teachers, and moreover shared teacher perspectives on many issues. Philip and Costas, neither of whose families were in business, were credentially motivated but ambivalent about education as the main or best route to career success. They came to a more culturally convergent position only after leaving school, for a long time putting more emphasis on ‘doing their own thing’, establishing a broader base for achievement. While at school they worked long hours in part time jobs, Philip as an usher in a city cinema and Costas in his uncle’s bakery and hot bread shop. Their ambition took a while to crystalize, but at school they saw success as just as likely to come from employment experience as from educational credentials. Costas, indeed, wanted to establish his own bakery business, an ambition which his uncle constantly disparaged. At school his strategy was largely based on deferment of any full commitment. Philip was keeping open his option on an upwardly mobile route; Costas was inclined to opt for the same route already travelled by his ethnic colleagues but in deference to his parents was keeping the credentialist path open as well. Philip had qualified at the end of primary school to attend a selective, academically prestigious high school, but his father, not fully appreciating the difference between such schools and Stokeham Boys High, had sent him to Stokeham because his older brother went there and it was the job of the older brother to look after younger siblings. Perhaps Philip did not have quite the same home reinforcement for academic striving as Dion. His parents allowed him to continue working part time through his Higher School Certificate year. His family was economically secure: Philip’s earnings were not required for the family budget. Nor were Costas’. Philip’s Higher School Certificate results were not at a level of which both his teachers and he thought him capable. The remaining Greeks were either even more ambivalent than Philip and Costas, like Con, Pappo and Pavlos for instance, or were simply less ambitious like Kazzo, who was aiming for a ‘good apprenticeship’ after the School Certificate, or else were already inclined to continue in family businesses. Stephen’s father and older brother operated an inner city service station; Anthony’s father had a small clothing factory. Chris always maintained that he wanted to become an ‘apprentice pimp’. Whether they persisted out of personal motivation or because of parental pressure, these boys’ relation to formal education remained, at best, purely external and instrumental. Ango-Australian footballers had credentialist motivation of varying degrees, with a mixture of personal ambition and response to parental pressure.

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JW: Fred: JW: Fred: JW: Fred:

Do you all want to get good results? At the end of the year otherwise me mum’ll come up. So you want a good report for your parents? Or for yourself? (smiling) For myself. Would most kids want it for themselves? In here, yeah. This is one of the brainy classes. But some kids couldn’t care less.

Most of Fred’s group were aiming for the School Certificate followed by an apprenticeship or failing that a semi-skilled occupation—Fergo, Beans, Clarkey, Zip and Murph. Blackjack and Rollo were unsure but could see no future in staying on, despite teachers’ encouragement. Mosey, Chopper, Fred, Omar and Cross had higher ambitions. Unlike the Greeks, none of them showed any signs of moving to a position convergent with teacher culture, although Mosey spoke of becoming a radio announcer and Fred a policeman. Mosey was in many ways a special case, in consciously developing a critique of both teacher culture and the Anglo-Australian Stokeham working-class culture with which he pessimistically identified (LL:Ch. 5). This was expressed at school in a detached, satirical attitude which earned him the reputation of a ‘smart alec’ with many teachers. The Greeks’ striving and commitment to school and upward mobility were absent from Anglo-Australian footballer culture. There was no evidence of strong family pressure to persist with schoolwork to the end at all costs. The footballers competed academically with each other and with other students, but short term status was already theirs through sport and Aussie macho superiority. For Greek footballers academic competition took on a clear macho dimension in the way success was won: through your own merit and independent effort, not teacher patronage. Kazzo: We all get good results. Look at that bunch over there. They’re all puff-heads. Crawlers, teachers’ pets. Competition in the classroom, especially between Anglo-Australian footballers and the top Greeks in Year 10, extended to joking and skylarking—a limited degree of ‘mucking up’—but notwithstanding occasional antagonism was never essentially anti-teacher. (Many teachers, too, appreciated Joan Woodburn’s point: ‘you have to put on a performance to get through to these kids. You have to entertain them’.) The handballers found this amusing—entertainment where it could be found was a virtually universal strategy for making school life acceptable—but were not in the same league as public entertainers. None of them had the competitive academic drive of the top Greeks. They accepted the credentialist necessity for school, and all wanted good steady jobs. Herman, Billy and Derek had higher aspirations than the others, some of whom, Stavros, Vince and Don, wanted to try ‘going on’ to the Higher School Certificate but were ambivalent, while others, although they were unsure and changed their mind throughout the year, leaned in the direction of the majority of Anglo-Australian footballers, to leave after the School Certificate. They also seemed more susceptible to the influence of teachers’ assessments of them and the job market. Billy: Miss Gould says I should go on to the Higher School Certificate, and so do my parents. I want a good job. Derek: Me too, but I dunno… Vince: I’m gunna go for an apprenticeship. JW: Is that what the teachers say you should do? Vince: Yeah.

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Don: Most of us, that’s what they say. Coping with School The majority of boys in these four groups, then, remained culturally divergent from formal education and externally related to teacher culture. Their long term strategy at school was to carve out a version of the student role enabling them to adapt to hard work and survive frequent boredom, a strategy which has aptly been described as ‘colonization’ (Woods, 1980a:89; Wakeford, 1969: 139). In basically foreign territory, they established their own cultural and territorial base, from which they could deal with the natives—teachers. The main element of this was the satisfaction they gained from being with their friends. Colonization in school was supplemented by truancy. Philip: Whenever we plan a jig I ask Costas to come, I ask Kazzo to come, Anthony and Stephen— y’ know, so it can be all fun, y’ know, when we’re down in the city… Kazzo: Y‘go to school more years, right? Eh! Look someone wants to have a bit of fun once in ‘is life eh?… Chris: Yeah! Whaddya gunna do?… Philip: I mean…we plan it, see we’re smart…we plan it when we’re not doin’ something on that day, we’re not doin’ something important. Chris: …y go an’ have a day off. There was general agreement that it was easy to get away with a day off; notes were easily forged (especially in Greek); and anyway, Teachers take sickies, don’t they?’ For most students there was some sort of trade off between doing well and working too hard. Some, like Chopper, even made a virtue out of ‘playing the percentages’. The final test of their success in Year 10, of course, was their School Certificate result. Chopper: I’m a proud man Jim. JW: Yeah? Chopper: Yeah, if you end up in Maths 1 you can bludge. I passed two tests all year and handed in three assignments and passed one of them, and, er… I only passed two tests all year, didn’t do any homework and got a free three, so there’s your average. If y’wanna work hard y’c’n do better but if y’wanna bludge y’gunna get an average mark so that’s good enough. JW: You reckon everybody knows that? Chopper: Not everyone knows it. I just found it out. Even for more culturally convergent students colonization was a way of dealing with the hard work of subjects like Maths and Science in which many students found little intrinsic interest. Across the groups there was evidence that students often could not understand the subject matter, even though sometimes they managed to convince teachers, in tests and classroom question and answer sessions, that they could (Woods, 1980:60). Recondite teacher language became an increasing problem for them as time went on. The demands of the authoritative culture became remorseless in Year 11 and 12. Beyond these four groups, many of ‘the Asians’ displayed an ethnically based persistence, an ultracredentialism which was remarkable by comparison, even with the top Greeks. Concentrating on the ‘hard’ subjects, several of them achieved excellent results in the Higher School Certificate.

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Isolated and culturally introverted, their convergence with teachers’ values meant that attendance at school, even when there were language problems, seemed based almost entirely on a strategy of commitment to schoolwork. There were, of course, many other students from a diversity of ethnic groups whose stories we are unable to trace here. Some rough generalizations are possible. Of the other large ethnic groups, Lebanese and Turkish students tended to be closer in aspiration to the less ambitious Greeks, with the Turks more ambivalent than the Lebanese about their identification with Australia and their aspiration to do well here. Rifat, for example, although he was friendly with both Greeks and AngloAustralians, thought that life was better in Turkey and and that most of his friends would prefer to live there. Like many students, his response to teacher culture was indifference; if pushed too far he could become quite hostile. Among the other less academically committed boys, especially the Anglo-Australians the experience, for as long as they stayed on, was similar to the handballers’: once the school leaving age of 15 had been reached it was mostly a question of ‘how long y’ c’n last’ (Keith, handballer), of sticking it out to the end if you had accepted teachers’ arguments or parents’ pressure about the importance of the School Certificate for ‘getting a job’. Some found jobs and left in Year 10. Some just left, without indicating that they had work. Of the original Year 10 population of 120, ninetysix did the School Certificate examinations. Many of those who stayed on were half hearted, their colonization strategies often failing to ward off frustration, disaffection, estrangement and a feeling that they were wasting their time responding to teachers’ demands. To summarize, students’ responses to teacher culture and in particular students’ strategies for coping with and formulating and pursuing their goals within the school context were products of several factors structuring their options. First, teacher culture itself created the overall framework. Within that, students’ use of cultural resources formed from the interaction of social class, ethnicity, family background, gender and individual ability produced a variety of responses, mostly remaining divergent from the basic norms and values of formal education with the exception of acceptance of credentialism. There remains one further factor, which has been implicit throughout: the age of the students and the specific stage of formal education in which they were involved. Year 10 was the year of the School Certificate and a point of formal transition, either to senior high school or elsewhere. This was a very specific context in which, above all, they were pressured from all sides to think about the future. It therefore gave a sharp edge to their assessment of the ‘relevance’ of the curriculum and the helpfulness of teachers. School and Work ‘Relevance’ Just as from the teacher perspective the curriculum was experienced through subject communities, so too from the student perspective the curriculum was fragmented into subjects. Some subjects were more interesting than others, depending on individual preference or the teacher; moreover some subjects would ‘help you more’ than others in your future, mainly employment. The majority of the ‘academic’ subjects—Maths, Science, English, History, Languages—were seen as having a chiefly credentialist relevance. You needed them for your School Certificate or Higher School

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Certificate, and it was appreciated that some of them, chiefly Maths and Science and to a lesser extent English, were higher status, likely to be more valued by employers. Students were used to teachers, especially in Maths and Science, claiming that knowledge in these subjects was used in industry. Other teachers had come to acknowledge that their subjects had no relevance to their students’ lives. In a discussion of problems Stokeham boys would face in their transition from school Ted Weiss, who taught Year 11 French and was Year 11 Form Master, put it bluntly. Mr Weiss: I find it very difficult to understand because I was brought up in an education system where my expectations of a job and a career were set out: I didn’t have any worries, you know, you and I didn’t concern ourselves with that sort of thing. But here kids are going through a school system which in fact is telling them all the time ‘You must learn this, but don’t expect to be able to use it when you leave’. So they’re just…they don’t care. It’s stupid; to them it seems stupid. CH: Well how do you feel about teaching French? Mr Weiss: Well, yes (laughs)…yes, it hasn’t sort of brought on any personal crises, but I often sit and wonder what I’m doing here. You know, if I were to look at it objectively, it’s irrelevant, totally irrelevant. CH: Does that ever come across in your class, in your discipline or anything like that? Mr Weiss: Oh yes, yes. It’s fairly apparent. It seems as if the French classes have been the dumping ground for problem students. In this year’s Year 10—an unholy collection of individuals! But I don’t blame the students, really, because I can understand their view of the subject. Why should they spend six periods a week, and do homework, for a subject which is not going to help them in any way? It’s enough that most of the subjects at school they see as largely irrelevant, and French is just totally irrelevant. So it certainly does colour their attitudes, and there are very negative feelings in the class. I can understand that. You’re against a brick wall that’s already been built before you get there. In Year 10 the brick wall—the class perspectives and aspirations latent in student cultures—put a rather immediate construction on ‘relevance’ which came to the fore in subjects like French. Teachers might have broad educational aims like ‘socialization’ and ‘maturity’, and some students might even talk generally about ‘education’ being relevant for jobs, but for all that the immediate situation also created a more specific problem, and because of teacher pressure about ‘jobs’ and ‘leaving’ or ‘staying on’ there was a dramatic mismatch between foreseeable options and subject content. The question for all students was ‘What am I going to do next year?’ Despite Harry Playfair’s effort to put job aspirations and plans in a realistic understanding of the current economic climate of labour market restructuring, it was not even ‘What education will make me a more flexible and adaptable worker over the long term?’ The school was in something of a bind. On the one hand, in the short term, ‘next year’ pressure was what buttressed the teachers’ authority; on the other it undermined some of their broader educational objectives, even in ‘vocational education’. This bind was exacerbated with students who were not doing so well, and in subjects of no perceived relevance beyond credentialism. Teachers outside the ‘hard subjects’ and those like French with relatively fixed and from students’ viewpoints ‘irrelevant’ curriculum content, were in somewhat less of a bind.

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In Industrial Arts (mainly Woodwork, Metalwork and Technical Drawing) there was a clear connection between content and certain jobs students could readily understand. This was reinforced by ‘Link Courses’ in which students were familiarized in a’hands on’ way with a range of trades taught at a nearby College of Technical and Further Education over a series of weekly afternoon visits. Physical Education was a special case, both as a release from ‘work’ for most students and a valued activity for many. Art and Music were adaptable to relevance to students’ non-vocational interest and even, for some, their vocational aspirations. In Art, Joan Woodburn tapped into forms convergent with student culture, especially video. One music teacher pursued a similar line (Chopper: ‘My next lesson’s a beauty—electric guitar!’), while the other maintained a rigorously academic approach, emphasizing the necessity of ‘hard work’ and competition for ‘achievement’ in her subject. In Social Science and English, teachers could and did work out ways of ‘making the subject relevant to the kids’, especially in Living Skills, which overlapped somewhat with Careers lessons, Link Courses and Work Experience. When asked to nominate ‘the lesson which most helped me to decide what job I want to do’, one third of Year 10 students nominated, jointly or singly, Living Skills, Link Courses and Work Experience, although only 2 percent nominated other Social Science subjects like Economics, Commerce and Geography. In nominating ‘lessons in which I have learned most about work and unemployment’ two thirds of students nominated lessons taught by the Social Science staff. However, nearly half of all students said ‘school has not helped me, on the whole, to decide what job I want to do’, while 37 percent said it had helped. Attempts to break down the sharp distinction, or classification, between school and work, and to frame pedagogical options more openly seemed to have had some impact on students’ responses to their schooling, even if a limited one. On an individual basis, particular students reported a decisive impact on their employment plans and aspirations from the visits of officers of the Commonwealth Employment Service and from a ‘job fair’ organized by the College of Technical and Further Education. After leaving school, many young men experienced changes in these perceptions of the purposes, value and relevance of the school and its curriculum from retrospective vantage points (LL:Ch. 5). Many teachers anticipated this and counselled students accordingly. Nevertheless, in the Year 10 context, they had to deal with present rather than future perceptions of problems, options and solutions, and make contact with those perceptions as they pursued some of their more generally and abstractly formulated goals in liberal and vocational education. Teachers’ Perspectives on Students’ Needs and Potentials Naturally, teachers’ strategies for ‘making it relevant’, for intercultural articulation, derived from their views of the educational needs and potential of their students and therefore of the kinds of people they had to teach. We have noted that some teachers made sociological generalizations in social class terms. Many used professional jargon current in social policy discussions, such as ‘at risk’ or ‘disadvantaged’; psychological terms such as ‘self esteem’ were common in discussion of students’ problems; and educational terms such as ‘underachiever’ were frequently employed. These ways of talking were frequently to be heard in the same context as some of the contrasts drawn by teachers between their way of life and the boys’ ‘different’ one.

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Many teachers pointed to characteristics of the students which they thought were developed in response to the locality in which they were growing up. There emerged a sharp contrast between those who made largely positive and those who made negative assessments of their abilities and potential. On the positive side, many students were considered street-wise, with initiative, drive and intelligence (even though they might not use these in ways middle-class students would); they were seen as independent, honest, tough, mature, friendly, and with a good knack for ‘handling people’. John Lever linked this with his own similar background. Mr Lever: The kids that come here have got a better… I’m not saying that they’re better off, but they’ve got a better grasp of what it takes to survive when there’s people around. With people at schools with plenty of money—those sort of backgrounds with their little house, and a dog and a pool, and that are very nicely protected by the group of friends that come around to the house. (…) The kids here, you gotta look after yourself. Their parents are working, where they’ve only got one person working he’s working at two jobs. And if they say ‘Look, I wanna go to the beach’ the dad or mum’ll say ‘Well, there’s the bus, get on it. Just be home at a certain time.’ Right? And most of the kids who have latitude that way, they’re well behaved when they’re at home. They get home in time. Terry Mayne associated his mixed assessment with his dissimilar background. Mr Mayne: The kids are obviously aggressive; they’re tense. I figured out that in PE and sport they’re not confined to a classroom, four walls. In that way I have an advantage over a lot of other teachers in the school. But they’re a top bunch of kids. CH: Why are they aggressive and tense? Mr Mayne: Where do you live? CH: [name of suburb]. Mr Mayne: Uh, if you were born and raised here, with the noise, the pollution…it’s a grotty area. There isn’t much here for the kids is there? Except for the local sporting group. I wouldn’t like to be raised here, I know that. And the fact that it’s so multicultural, that’s naturally gunna breed aggression and conflicts. We get kids from Turkey and Cyprus a couple of years after they’ve had riots over there, the Turks cutting the Greeks’ throats and viceversa. Have a look around the area: I don’t know how many nationalities there would be, but there’d be plenty. Heaps. A few teachers saw some of the boys as ‘drifters’, ‘no-hopers’ ‘troublemakers’, ‘unsure of the world’ outside. These were applied to many of the boys other teachers described in the above positive terms. Where John Lever saw them as having confidence and self reliance, others thought they lacked self esteem. The footballers were the group which inspired the most sharply discrepant comments, with some teachers modifying their negative response in terms like ‘characters’, ‘rogues’, or ‘misdirected initiative’. Yet whatever the discrepancies, the foot-ballers were popular with a wide range of staff. Teachers tended to speak of the handballers in twos and threes rather than as one group. They were perceived as ‘hard workers’ and ‘triers’, some of whom were ‘immature’ or ‘a bit silly’. The Greeks provoked a range of responses, both as individuals and as an ethnic group. The three friends were generally seen as unable to cope well with their peers and at odds with, ‘too soft’ for, their environment.

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Teachers with overall positive assessment tended to associate aggressive or disobedient behaviour either with immaturity or with mistakes in teacher strategies. Nearly all teachers believed that Stokeham boys would find employment, albeit perhaps not immediately and with periods of unemployment and adjustment. This view was supported by the Commonwealth Employment Service officer. The reasons for this belief were at least twofold. First, there were several teachers who believed that the ‘unemployment problem’ was a ‘myth’, that the unemployed ‘could find jobs if they wanted them’, or that the unemployed were ‘unemployable’. Second, the majority thought that their students would find work because of the kind of people they were, many recognizing the importance of ‘contact’ in the family and community. Here there was a large number of middle-class teachers who had come to the view of their colleagues with a workingclass background. Ms Morrish: I reckon they’ll get jobs, because they’re the sort of kids that do. They’re not the sort that sit around. Mr Lever: They might not get the job they want, but any job they do they’ll be happy I think because…it’s not the job that’s important, it’s the people. If they like the people the job’s secondary, you know. A lot of kids here, they’re not job-minded—it’s not the be-all and end-all of things. Many teachers, including those pushing the notion of a ‘career’, thought that although students expressed the desire for professional jobs, or had ‘unrealistic expectations’, when confronted with the labour market they would adopt the ‘a job’s a job’ line. There was a view that they were being pressured too hard by parents, both for high aspirations and for ‘going on’ to the Higher School Certificate, especially the Greeks, when they were far better suited to trades. Almost without exception, teachers believed that most students would go into manual work, the better ones as tradesmen and the others as labourers or factory workers. Stan Pickford, a Social Science teacher who had done research in the school for a postgraduate university degree, attributed mistaken aspirations to media misrepresentation of social class reality. Mr Pickford: I think the example set up by the media, that usually picks up middle-class people in advertisements, living a middle-class lifestyle in rather nice surroundings with a large car in the driveway, is the sort of objective that a lot of kids here set for themselves and they can’t see the correlation between their academic ability and education and actually getting into the middle-class type employment. I think a lot of…kids see middle-class employment as a way of getting out of the binds that their parent are forced into—living in rented accommodation and constantly being short of money. But, you know, they can’t see how much getting into those occupations has to do with education. I suppose that has to do with the kind of family you’re already born into. He also took the view that career education should deal with this misperception. Mr Pickford: They have some unreal idea of expecting to get into higher income white collar jobs and, um, with all the factors going against them, I think careers education is trying to bring some realism into their objectives.

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Vocational Education The Careers Adviser in Year 10 tended to impress on students that the skilled trades were where to find a ‘good job where the opportunities lie’. But, responding to Commonwealth Employment Service data which, to his surprise, showed that a significant number of our Year 10 school leavers got clerical work rather than the trades and labouring jobs teachers had expected, Mr Playfair said ‘I’ll definitely push that harder this year!’ Within this perspective of ‘responsive realism’, he saw his role as working for a close match between students’ plans and the labour market as he saw it. Mr Playfair: I think perhaps there’s a lot of mismatching. I think it’s part of my role to make them more competitive, so if I see that there aren’t enough mechanics jobs about, I ask ‘But do you know about spray painting, vehicle trimming?’ The apprenticeships are there, but the kids don’t know about them. But he foresaw a problem with encouraging indiscriminate apprenticeship aspirations when, although parents might want their son to get a ‘good trade’, school results indicate that he will find the College of Technical and Further Education too hard. Mr Playfair: Sometime it happens that…say toolmaking. If he’s in the bottom Math class, and he’d have difficulty coping with the Tech, you then try and aim for the same sort of work area on a lower level, and a [factory] shop assistant might be the thing. CH: How do you feel about steering kids into very boring and repetitive jobs? Mr Playfair: I suppose it’s looking at your own values, you know—middle-class and so on—I look upon those jobs as fairly mundane. I certainly wouldn’t like to do them. Mr Playfair had worked for six weeks in an aluminium factory in extrusion processes. Mr Playfair: It was hazardous, boring, very hot. The early excitement wore off. I also worked in a chemical firm, in research and development. Dealing with the workers, literally down below, I can quite understand their position: the high staff turnover, strikes, and so on —just to relieve boredom. On possibilities of unemployment Mr Playf air made a lower rating of his students than had many of his colleagues. Mr Playfair: I see my role as uplifting them. Unemployment is certainly not something I would like to be in, and therefore—transfer my own values—they might not want to be in. CH: That does change your role, doesn’t it, if there are just not enough jobs to go around? Mr Playfair: I suppose it does. I suppose at one stage the success of a careers adviser would be the least number of unemployed people there were. But that doesn’t really worry me: that varies from school to school. I’m sure I’d be very successful at High, but unsuccessful in a place like this, where they’re… I don’t know…they’re just socially less able. I don’t think they’re as able to sell themselves as a product to employers as kids at other schools I’ve taught at. CH : Why can’t they? Is it because they’ve never been taught? Or that they think it’s a lot of rubbish? Mr Playfair: I think it’s multiple factors. I think with some of them it’s ‘Oh, don’t need this. I’ll be OK; I’ll get a job’. I think that’s true for a small number, but seeing I don’t know where

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they go to, I don’t know whether it’s all true. But they say ‘Oh, I’m right, I’ve got a job with my father’. ‘And if that falls through?’ I say. ‘Oh well, with my uncle. He works at the council and he’ll get me in’. But I think it’s also a fact that the majority of them just don’t know how to go about it: writing a letter, presenting themselves for an interview. The business community is pretty conservative, and they like to see a short back and sides and a kid neatly dressed for the initial interview. I explain to them’ Well of course that doesn’t make you a better motor mechanic, but unfortunately it’s all part of the process of selection. You’re going for the job, and economics make it necessary’. CH: Toe the line. Mr Playfair: Yeah, the more you toe the line, the better chance you have of being employed. Initially. However, he had qualms about the notion of ‘career’. Mr Playfair: And just the whole concept of career is bloody ridiculous. We should be called job advisers, or work advisers. But career advisers! It’s all right for ten years ago. The notion of a career was problematic because unemployment and workforce restructuring threatened job security and made it unlikely that this generation would work long term in one occupation as many of their parents had done. But there was another problem. ‘Career’ had different connotations according to latent class cultures, deriving from divergent attitude to work. The teacher/ student variation in attitudes was at the heart of the problems facing teachers trying to make the curriculum ‘relevant’. In the professional teacher culture educational knowledge was intrinsically related to work, and work conceived basically as a career in which in activity itself was rewarding and fulfilling. Some few students had internalized this perspective. The majority in the four groups which we are studying, except for the three and a few Greeks, had not internalized this perspective. Many, to be sure, hoped for jobs, especially in the trades, that they would be good at and would find enjoyable, but did not see the job content as closely related to the content of the high school curriculum. It would be fair to say that all students saw work as a means of earning money, and such upward mobility as they aspired to as a means to a more prosperous and comfortable life, rather than to status, and that very few as yet had adopted the value of work as a means to personal fulfilment to the extent that teacher culture assumed this about the work it understood. Hence the credentialist hold of the school, so far as it went. Hence also, no doubt, most of the expressed aspirations to middle-class occupations. Stan Pickford put his finger on it: They can’t see how much getting into those occupations has to do with education. That has to do with the kind of family you’re already born into’. They shared their parents’ view of work as basically a means of earning money, hopefully made enjoyable by contact with congenial workmates, something not entirely peculiar to their social class position; but they also carried on their parents’ divergence from the class values implicit in teacher culture, which was derived from the kinds of jobs their parents understood. This translated into something of a credibility problem for teachers. Not only was the curriculum perceived as largely ‘irrelevant’, but teachers, as people, were seen as lacking in experience in the world of work as experienced by students through their families, their neighbourhood and their own experience of part-time work, or even seen by students like Mosey as scarcely doing ‘real work’ at all, bludgers or dealers in wares remote from students’ perceived employment problems.

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The credibility problem was illustrated dramatically when ‘handballer’ Allan’s father took him to a weekend ‘Employment Opportunities’ day conducted by a large chemical firm near Stokeham. On Monday Allan told me animatedly what he had learned and how it would help him get a job. One session, taught in a laboratory, had covered aspects of industrial chemistry. When I asked Allan’s science teacher whether this material was covered in the syllabus the answer was ‘Yes, I taught it earlier this year’. When asked whether he had pointed out the applications of the knowledge in industry, and which jobs might be associated with it, the answer was again ‘Yes’ followed by a detailed explanation. Returning to Allan the next day I asked whether he remembered those lessons. The answer was ‘No’. So far as I could ascertain, Allan’s father had not inquired whether what was being taught at school had any links with the ‘Employment Opportunities’ day, or vice versa. It would seem that the relative autonomy of the school, and the cultural divergence between student and teachers, can create a learning mode in which curriculum content continues to be perceived as ‘irrelevant’ even where this is not the case. There may be a deep rooted and relatively indiscriminate cultural prejudice against taking teachers seriously, with cultural conservatism operating strongly. The cultural conservatism, however, may not work as strongly against employers, who—after all they provide the jobs—are viewed as credible sources of ‘relevant’ knowledge and advice. If this is the case, it probably makes matters even more difficult when employers are perceived by students as having a low opinion of the education system and its teachers. There was evidence that teachers misjudged students’ perspectives too. Although 36 percent of Year 10 students said that ‘if I could choose any job, I would choose’ an occupation in the professions, the arts or the media, a lower proportion, 23 percent, said ‘the job I actually expect to get’ would be in those fields. The overwhelming majority nominated other jobs, with a little less than 25 percent nominating trades as their aspiration and their expectation, and around 10 percent offering no responses. There is some evidence here of high aspirations, and perhaps some evidence of ‘unrealistic’ expectations, but the evidence suggests that students were more ‘realistic’ than many teachers recognized. Interviews suggested that teachers tended either to overestimate the extent of high aspirations, to confuse students’ aspirations with students’ expectations. They also underestimated the gap between the two, or interpreted the gap as indicating a problem in students’ ‘self esteem’. Students’ attitudes to work, then, were more influenced by what they learned from outside the school than from teachers. Discrepancies could make for confusion if experienced in the context of high aspirations, but were more likely to reinforce, at best, the external, credentialist attitude to curriculum content and schoolwork, and at worst the drift to disenchantment with formal education. Sadly, disenchantment was stimulated in many students when they found that the hard work they believed they had put into Year 10, in response sometimes to parents’ and almost always to teachers’ pressures, did not produce School Certificate results of a standard they had hoped for, even expected. Rightly or wrongly, many attributed their results to misleading or unfair treatment from teachers or to deficiencies in their own ability, rather than the working out of an underlying cultural divergence. To summarize: at Stokeham the different social class backgrounds of teachers and students and the occupational cultures of teachers strongly affected the initial conditions for intercultural articulation in formal education, setting specific problems for individuals and groups. However, given this

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context, educational outcomes were the product of strategies developed by both teachers and students, some of which led to cultural convergence, and all of which need to be understood as taking up, reworking or creating options within the complex articulations which constituted the school as a social structure. Note. I would like to express my thanks to Christine Hunt, my collaborator in field-work (especially interviewing of teachers) and analysis of data. I am grateful to the New South Wales Department of Education for permission to conduct the study, and to the Principal, staff and students of ‘Stokeham Boys High’ for their warm support and cooperation. The research was made possible by a grant from the Education Research and Development Committee. In quoted transcript material, description and analysis, the names of all individuals and places have been changed to respect confidentiality. References BALL, S.J., and LACEY, C. (1982) ‘Subject Disciplines as the Opportunity for Group Action: A Measured Critique of Subject Subcultures’, in WOODS, P. (Ed.) Teacher Strategies: Explorations in the Sociology of the School, London, Croom Helm. BERNSTEIN, B. (1977) Class, Codes and Control, 2nd, edn, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul. GIDDENS, A. (1979) Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure and Contradiction in Social Analysis, London, Macmillan. GIROUX, H.A. (1983) Theory and Resistance in Education: A Pedagogy for the Opposition, South Hadley, Mass., Bergin Press. HARGREAVES, D.H. (1980) ‘The Occupational Culture of Teachers’, in WOODS, P. (Ed.) Pupil Strategies: Explorations in the Sociology of the School, London, Croom Helm. LACEY, C. (1977) The Socialisation of Teachers, London, Methuen. POLLARD, A. (1979) ‘Negotiating deviance and “getting done” in primary school classrooms’, in BARTON, LAND MEIGHAN, R. (Eds) Schools, Pupils and Deviance, Driffield, Nafferton Books. QUINE, W.V. (1974) The Roots of Reference, La Salle, Open Court. WAKEFORD, J.C. (1969) The Cloistered Elite: A Sociological Analysis of the English Public Boarding School, London, Macmillan. WALKER, J.C. (1985) ‘Materialist Pragmatism and Sociology of Education’, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 6, 1, pp. 55–74. WALKER, J.C. (1987) ‘Knowledge, Culture and the Curriculum’, in SMYTH, W.J. (Ed.) Educating Teachers: Changing the Nature of Professional Knowledge, London, Falmer Press, pp. 95–106. WALKER, J.C. (1988a) Louts and Legends: Male Youth Culture in an Inner-City School, Sydney, Allen and Unwin. WALKER, J.C. (1988b) ‘Building on Youth Cultures in the Secondary Curriculum’, in CORSON, D.J. (Ed.) Education for Work: Background to Policy and Curriculum, Palmerston North, Dunmore Press, pp. 184– 94. WOODS, P. (1980) Sociology and the School: An Interactionist Viewpoint, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul. WOODS, P. (1984) ‘Negotiating the Demands of Schoolwork’, in HAMMERSLEY, M., and WOODS, P. (Eds) Life in School: The Sociology of Pupil Culture, Milton Keynes, Open University Press.

7 Reproducing Vocationalism in Secondary Schools: Marginalization in Practical Workshops Robert Mealyea

‘I was bloody pleased when I arrived at my school, everything in the wood-work department is pre-cut for the students, right from day one up until the end of the year. Jeez it makes life easy, all I have to do is hand out the bits and all the kids have to do is assemble them. It’s like industry’s gettin’ too in a way, they are specializing, so I reckon we’re on the right track’ (secondary trainee-tradeteacher). Introduction This chapter is partly based on a larger study (Mealyea, 1988). Briefly, in mid-1985, sixteen qualified tradespersons, fifteen males and one female, chose a mid-career change and entered secondary school teaching in Victoria. Unlike most prospective teachers, each entered teaching from a former occupation. Skilled tradespersons, each had many years’ experience in industrial settings within the ‘building trades’. Each entered teacher education possessing highly developed trade skills and an extensive knowledge of industry. Thus they had ample time to develop a healthy occupational self-identity which they brought to teaching as work. Historically, the education of secondary technical school trade teachers (Technology Studies’ teachers in the new Ministry of Education nomenclature; ‘tradies’ is their preferred term) has been seen as best conducted through a master-apprentice system. Following compulsory schooling, a person wishing to enter a trade obtains employment and begins an apprenticeship. After coming through the ranks to master-craftsperson, he or she may wish to be a trade teacher. If selected by the Victorian Ministry of Education for employment as a teacher, the tradesperson undergoes the appropriate teacher education course and at the same time becomes an intern teaching part-time in a secondary technical school. Graduation is followed by classification as a full-time teacher. Those interviewed, the interns and their experienced school colleagues, teach in schools undergoing rapid and discomforting ideological changes. The Ministry of Education has released a set of proposals aimed at reforming trade teaching in secondary schools. The proponents of the new Technology Studies program expect it to provide student-centred, negotiated and practically-based learning activities; a wide range of experiences linking theory and practice is expected. There is to be less of a focus on narrow instrumentalism and more of a focus on students constructing useful objects using raw and processed materials. Students will also analyze the ‘how and why’ of how things work, and explore why different materials are used in the construction of utilitarian objects.

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The development of head and hand skills used in concert will be stressed in the use of a wide range of tools and machinery, but will not necessarily be aimed solely at narrow vocationalism. In short, a less exclusive emphasis on narrow vocationalism in favour of a more general approach to education is proposed by the Education Ministry, whose proponents envisage relocating practical subjects as an integral rather than a peripheral part of each school’s curriculum, as is the case at present. This move aims to bring about fundamental changes in the thinking of trade teachers concerning their role in secondary education. The proposed reforms call into question their utilitarian, instrumentalist view of the purpose of secondary education. It will be shown that these proposed reforms impact dramatically on trade teachers’ view of their work, creating a marked negative effect on their occupational self-identity. Theoretical Framework and Research Methodology The Ethnographic Approach to Research One useful method used to collect and analyze data about teachers’ work is associated with ethnography (Glaser and Strauss, 1967; Bruyn, 1966). This approach allows for the generation of theory which is grounded in recorded data, as well as the testing of existing theoretical ideas available in the professional literature. The grounded theory approach used in this study permits a combination of a variety of data-gathering methods in developing interrelated hypotheses about job change, re-socialization and teachers’ work (Goodman, 1985:27). The theoretical framework adopted here is set within the Symbolic Interactionist tradition of Becker (1971), and includes the work on self by Mead (1934), Goffman (1959) and Woods (1983). ‘Definition of the Situation’ (Thomas, 1928) is used as a means of exploring each participant’s understanding of the events. Thomas’ dictum is that what is perceived as real is real in its consequences, and as such is an essential feature of the occupational self-identity of tradespersons becoming teachers to help explain the way in which they perceive and structure their social world. Research Methodology Integrated methods of data collection were adopted to collect and analyze the data presented below (Burgess, 1984:78–142). These include document analysis, participant observation and interviewing of experienced trade and academic teachers in schools, trainee-teachers, their school supervisors and College lecturers. To date there has been no in-depth examination of the culture of practical workshops in secondary schools. Therefore, this article restricts itself to a microsociological perspective, concentrating on the contribution to understanding vocational reproduction in technical schooling by examining the work of practical studies teachers, and trainee-teachers, in their teaching settings. To this end, a phenomenological method drawing on the work of Dale (in Flude and Ahier, 1974) is used. This method acknowledges—notwithstanding Tanguy’s (1985:33) central point that the state of power relationships within the school cannot adequately account for the reproduction, shifts, or reversals in the hierarchy of knowledge since this phenomenon has its roots outside the walls of the

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educational institution—that the actors in this particular situation bring from the outside world personal occupational biographies to the process of teaching. ‘Thick description’ (Geertz, 1973:6) of each individual’s perspective is necessary to understand the process. Data from these perspectives provide the basis for a grounded theory (Glaser and Strauss, 1967; Martin and Turner, 1986; Turner, 1981) of practical teachers’ work, and ultimately of the type of education received by their pupils. The discussion focuses on the views of various groups of experienced practical teachers and a trainee-teacher cohort (and some academic teachers), as they relate to each other, and to teaching as work. The Context: The Teacher Education Model The internship model of teacher education as practised at the Teachers’ College, situated in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne, means that the interns take up positions of full-time classroom responsibility upon entering the programme. This means that they enter secondary schools immediately, both as trainees and as teachers who are totally accountable for the welfare and instruction of their own classes. Accordingly, these noviciates to teaching do not undergo the usual anticipatory socialization in relative institutional isolation from the work context. Rather, due to the internship model of teacher education, they learn simultaneously workplace occupational norms and credentialling norms; the latter they find at odds with the former. But while the Teachers’ College sets out to challenge the teaching of narrow vocationalism in the school workshop teaching setting (referred to hereafter as the workshop sub-culture), the sub-culture itself positively encourages it. Thus mature-age trainee-teachers, working in both settings as interns while undergoing a career change, experience considerable dissonance and role strain. Vocationalism The educational ideology underpinning the practice of secondary technical school workshops can be identified by a brief overview of some common characteristics. Traditionally, teaching within workshops has focused on student acquisition of trade-oriented manual skills. This approach, referred to hereafter as ‘vocationalism’, developed over time almost to the exclusion of any emphasis on student development of mental or social skills. The needs of the individual learner are subsumed under a practice which favours the production and economic needs of the related industry from which the tradesperson, now a teacher, emerged. The relationship to industry is obvious. Furthermore, interaction between the various workshop subjects and the other school subjects is discouraged by the educational ideologies of both academic and trade teachers; each group is highly suspicious of the other. This division is also exacerbated by the style of the school architecture. These twin themes are developed further later. Historically, secondary technical schools were established in response to the economic, social and political forces prevailing during the early years of the twentieth century. They were intended to train and educate society’s future tradespeople. Even today, practical studies teachers are still drawn from industry. As a result, the educational ideology they hold toward schooling is of the type defined by Kemmis et al. (1983:9) as the ‘vocational/neo-classical orientation’:

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…in which education is understood as a preparation for work. For some this will be skilled or semi-skilled labour requiring well-known and defined competencies; for others, it will be managerial or professional, requiring higher levels of general education and abstract, universalised thinking. The vocational/neo-classical orientation finds a place for both in separate education systems (for example, in the technical/high school split in Victoria). Proponents of this orientation see themselves as ‘realist’: the world is hierarchically-ordered and the best endowed (in ability and background) will in any case find their way to the most rewarding positions [brackets in original]. Similarly, and as a result of assessing correspondence received from various states in Australia while preparing his book The Curriculum and Work: An Overview of the Australian Experience, Hughes (1987:10) argues that‘…there have always been links between the school curriculum and work’. He adds that in the technical area of the curriculum especially ‘…vocational skills were developed’. Tradespersons who argue they are preparing children for work in what they define as the ‘real’ world, remain enthusiastic and consistent proponents of this particular curriculum orientation. Vocationalism vs. Professionalism Rejection or affirmation of this pedagogical view is found in the particular contexts the interns are immersed in each week. The former view prevails within the Teachers’ College, the latter within the school workshop sub-culture. Polarization of the ideological expressions of technical education has more recently taken the specific form of broad, general education of the individual versus vocationalism. The reforms question and challenge the dominant structure and style of pedagogy in practical work-shops in secondary schools. These competing ideological beliefs form the basis of the present schism in technical education of those who see work based on a division of the head and the hand, leaving manually-oriented tradespersons feeling denigrated. They view general education as the antithesis of vocationalism, leading to the sharp distinction between hand and head work so evident in their pronouncements. It is no reproach to tradies that their outlook reflects the hand-mind dualism still prevalent in secondary schooling. The many protagonists of the vocationalist outlook, i.e., experienced practical subject teachers, insist that it should remain unchanged, and be accepted unquestionably by newcomers in its entirety. This attitude is in itself an adequate comment on the industrial model that formed such protagonists’ worldview. Practical teachers are not alone in this view. It is clear from various studies on pupils’ expectations of education (Collins and Hughes, 1982; Holt and Reid, 1988:15– 31) that they too wish schools to contribute to an issue they see as most important, the gaining of employment. Other data (Mealyea, 1988) indicate that within technical schools, specific student groups studying practical studies also hold the same view as their trade teachers of the Ministry’s reforms, i.e., they also regard any reforms antithetical to vocationalism as poor. Drawing on this view, trade teachers often enthusiastically quote their students’ wishes for an occupational-specific pedagogy, thus demonstrating that they perceive in their students’ orientations to curriculum legitimate support for their self-definition of tradesperson, and thus their teaching role.

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Proposed Reforms to Practical Subjects in Technical Schools The Ministry’s proposed reforms to practical teaching, which aim to treat practical studies as a culturally valuable, integrated part of the whole school curriculum, with no particular trade or narrow vocational orientation, caused unexpected and almost universal opposition to emerge from the trainees’ training school supervisors, and also from within certain practical subject areas of the Teachers’ College. Experienced trade teachers in schools perceived the Ministry’s proposed reforms to vocationalism as a watering down of their subject area, thus threatening their specific aim of education as vocational job-preparation, to becoming, in the words of more than one critic, ‘teaching wishy-washy academic wank’. Analysis of such utterances (and there are many more) indicate that not only do trade teachers perceive a difference between working with the hands and the head, they see hand work as far superior to head work. Such beliefs lead to their view that secondary school workshops should provide students with narrow, vocationally-oriented trade skills, leading directly to work. Theirs is a perception of education which differs substantially from the new emphasis in secondary schools of courses concerned with skills and competencies which, although related to working life (Hughes, 1987:12), are not of a particularly narrow, vocational nature. But this form of educational thinking runs counter to the tradies’ strongly-held view that practical education should lead to an apprenticeship in industry. This is a viewpoint with a long history in technical education (Mealyea, 1990b:6–20). It is crucially important to understand tradespersons’ strongly held occupational self-definition in bringing the theme of this chapter sharply into focus. What is at stake in the Ministry’s proposed reforms to practical education is a definition of a particular form of vocational training, that, while playing down the emphasis still prevalent on narrow vocationalism, nevertheless adequately prepares the student for a life of work. Only one or two of the trade teachers interviewed during this investigation clearly recognize the difficulties their pupils face in gaining employment in the 1990s. Most believe that employment difficulties are easily overcome simply by the students acquiring, through their expert tuition, the necessary trade skills in order to be well prepared for job entry. This may well be a naïve hope. These views are also mirrored within the trade areas of the training schools where the supervising teachers (who themselves once enjoyed full employment in industry) are fond of saying: ‘If the kids work hard they’ll get the right trade skills, then they’ll get a secure job. They’ll then be right for life’. Most endlessly argue ‘Hard work and the gaining of technical skills are the only worthwhile golden rules of life’. A refrain to which many coyly add: ‘After all, look where they got us’. Ironically, it is in the face of growing youth unemployment that these teachers advocate increased attention to preparation of pupils for work, stating the firmly-held belief that once ‘fitted out’ with job skills, they will then be able to compete effectively against all comers. However, despite all the years of high-blown government rhetoric about reforms to practical subjects, classroom observation shows that pupils remain passive fitters of pre-fabricated material; the teacher remains the central actor in the process. That trainee-teachers undergoing a career change are grateful this traditional approach to practical learning still prevails is clear: Jock: I was bloody pleased when I arrived at my school, everything in the woodwork department is pre-cut for the students, right from day one up until the end of the year. Jeez it makes life easy,

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all I have to do is hand out the bits and all the kids have to do is assemble them. It’s like industry’s gettin’ too in a way, they are specializing, so I reckon we’re on the right track. Hidden in Jock’s enthusiasm is the fundamental problem facing the Education Ministry’s proposed reforms, and the supporting work of the Teachers’ College staff. It is too much to expect—as will be evident below—tradespersons making the transition from industry to education to decentre easily from what they perceive to be the proper work of the classroom, simply on the basis of government rhetoric. The teaching of vocationalism is believed by tradespersons to be their natural role, simply a further extension of what they have always been engaged in as work. Jock’s correct perception of increasing specialization of industrial work practices, and the modularization of assembling practices in the building industry, lends powerful support to this view of teaching. It provides comfort to those whose sole interest is in preparing students with vocational skills for the world of industrial work. In Jock’s eyes:‘… Zwe’re on the right track’. The above brief description of the classroom workshop practice of teachers, and the educational ideology they bring to the process (developed later in more detail), reflects the interests of those who frame practical studies. Their unshakeable view is that as qualified tradespersons, they are the most suitable to transmit the appropriate practical trade skills and attitudes to secondary school students. Today, these views are still consistent with the broader historical context of Victoria’s secondary schools which offered little synthesis of manual and intellectual work, preferring to separate the two. Hence the vocational/neo-classical split of technical and high schools described by Kemmis et al. (1983:9). It is only against this background that any attempts by either the Education Ministry to change current practice, or the Teachers’ College to assist trainee-teachers (and experienced teachers through inservice activities) to adapt to change, can be understood. Thus, given the proposed reforms it is timely to ask two questions: Who today enters practical studies teaching? What do they bring to, and find, in practical education? The Ministry of Education Pre-employment Interviews: Status Confirmation For decades, and at the time of writing, an advertisement specifically calling for tradespersons to enter teaching appears once or twice a year in a daily paper. A footnote often details the closing date: people with almost half a life-time working in industry are required to respond to the advertisement and all it offers in just a week or two. Pre-entry interviews of applicants are conducted by the Teachers’ College staff and by officers from the employing authority, i.e., the Victorian Ministry of Education. At the interviews attended by this writer, the main tenor of the advertisement was reinforced by the interviewers each placing great stress on ascertaining each applicant’s trade background experience and trade skills by close and specific questioning. Altruism: The Calling to Teach It is clear that tradespersons entering teaching have a common aim: a deep wish to share their industrial work experiences with students in schools. This is obvious from each applicant’s demeanour during the interviews (Mealyea, 1988:159–70). Clearly, they are very proud of their

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trade experience. They place heavy emphasis on how they perceive their forthcoming role in schools, describing it as their being primarily responsible for students acquiring vocationallyoriented job skills. For example, answers to an interviewer’s question: ‘What do you think you bring to the modern kids in schools today?’ invariably brought forth this type of response: Paul: I have a lot of background experience and a lot of trade experience that I feel I can pass on. Doug: I’ve got a lot of sheetmetal skills, and as a tradesman I want to instil some of those qualities in the kids. One particular question seeking to elicit from an applicant information not related to his day-to-day work, made little difference to the standard answer given: Interviewer: Why don’t you tell us something about yourself? Dave: Well, I’ve been a fitter all my life. I’ve had lots of trade experiences which can be of benefit to the kids. I’d find it a challenge to manage young kids. I’m keen to give things to the students that I know about. One powerful nuance present in each interviewee’s response, impossible to describe in the cold print of transcripts, is the pride in the voice when they describe their past work and thus who they are in terms of occupational self-identity. Valued trade knowledge, held as capital, set the pace during the interviews. This had the effect of enabling the applicants to feel comfortable and confident they were the right people for the job of teaching secondary school students. In this manner they signalled their expectations of finding certain conditions and role expectations prevailing in secondary technical education. Rapid subsequent offers of employment as teachers affirms their potential worth to schools in their own minds and reinforces their sense of vocationalism. Industrial Worldview Taking the above factors into account, the strong emphasis each applicant in their new teaching role places on vocationalism is understandable. Such an outlook is a product of the structure of the industrial framework within which they formed their personal sense of occupational self. Thus, prospective trainee-teachers come to teaching tightly locked into a narrow, industrially-formed conception of their role in teaching, a role defined and honed during long years of industrial experience. Thus the teaching of narrow vocationalism appears natural to tradespersons. Consequently, it is a role not seen by them as open to the proposed changes mooted by the Ministry of Education, changes mediated through the Teachers’ College curriculum. As a result, data collected in this investigation reflects each tradesperson’s pride in their occupational self-identity. Interns and experienced practical studies teachers fondly describe themselves as trade teachers, or ‘tradies’. Occupational Self-identity The fact that tradepersons enter teaching with a well-defined ‘presenting culture’, is clear: ‘I very nearly wore my overalls to the interview. I didn’t want to dress up in any way, it’s just not me’, said one at pre-entry. On the whole, their talk is of cars, motor-cycles, sports and of manual jobs done on industrial building sites. Their point of reference is the workshop, making and doing things, and

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the solving of problems of a certain practical type. Thus a ‘before teaching’ picture of the cohort studied (Mealyea, 1988:170–226) indicates that they comprise one large homogeneous group based on a shared, predominant occupational self-identity. Obvious pride in their occupational self-identity also springs from sources related to possessing manual dexterity. For example, some of the trade teachers hold licenses issued by external authorities (to the trade). For example, the plumbers are licensed by the Melbourne and Metropolitan Board of Works, and the electricians by the State Electricity Commission. This certification serves a number of purposes, not least of which is a higher salary. Thus they enjoy somewhat higher status in the community’s mind compared with other trades. The State-sanctioned license to operate as a tradesperson also implies that only those in the particular occupation are considered competent to do the work and to judge when the work is carried out properly. These are also issues crucial to the forming of occupational self-identity among tradespersons, who list them among the most important aspects of their background. They help form the particular ideology they bring to the task of teaching. To be thought of as tradies is their wish, spoken and unspoken, and is a common theme running throughout the data. This presentation of self gives deep meaning to their work. Tradespersons becoming teachers are totally unlike those workers who describe the increasingly boring, automated pace of their daily jobs in Terkel’s Working (1974:1). For those workers ‘…surviving the [work] day is triumph enough’. In contrast, tradespersons find meaning and identity through their daily work. In all instances, there is an acknowledgment of high status derived from being a tradesperson; they overtly celebrate what it means to work with one’s hands in what they describe as the ‘real’ world. Unlike Terkel’s (1974) workers, the tradespersons quoted here have no need to use euphemisms to describe themselves. The carpenters interviewed define themselves as carpenters or ‘chippies’, rather than the more inflated term ‘builders’. The electricians are ‘sparkies’, not electrical engineers, and the plumbers are happy with their existing title—not for them the euphemism ‘sanitary engineer’ of Terkel’s (1974:5) workers. Nevertheless, as keenly as they see their work, there is no viewing it through a romantic fog. They describe it as it is, often dirty, sometimes boring and dangerous; but above all else, it is discussed with admiration. From their work they derive their sense of personal worth, and anything which attempts to challenge who they are, including the importunings of the credentialling authority, is held in contempt. Practically oriented, tradies are highly suspicious of abstract theorizing about the world. They continually describe theirs as the ‘real’ world compared to the ‘wank’ of the Teachers’ College. They stress that industry is a ‘black and white’ world where things ‘get done’. They adhere to an unshakeable belief in ‘the basics’, a set of rigid standards by which to compare and thus measure the worth of a job, and thus self. Job conscious, they are respectful of the work ethic. Self-reliance The role of being the ‘boss’ (which may mean being wholly self-reliant while working on a building site as well as the more traditional meaning of having supervisory power over other workers, or owning a business), is a strong theme these people bring to teaching. It means that they expect to be fully in charge of their work, which includes controlling the learning process for their students. The

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basis for this belief comes from their possessing, and now as teachers distributing, the trade skills they thoroughly believe students need, and want. But undergoing a mature-age career transition for such a group is not without certain problems. The Shock of the New During the early settling-in days, interviews with and observations of trainee-teachers actually teaching indicate they often view problem students in the classroom dispassionately. This enables them sometimes to blame the students for their own settling-in difficulties, and leads to their treating the students somewhat impersonally. One trainee, Noel, believed that the answer to their oftdiscussed discipline problems lay in their own hands. He argued that they should simply teach narrow vocationalism: They selected us because of our trade backgrounds, so I feel that this is what we should be concentrating on with the kids, after all they all come to the tech [technical school] to get an apprenticeship, and we were employed because we know their needs better than anyone else. But such a view leads to unexpected surprises for those undergoing the transition from industry to education, as Dave discovered. The rapid unnerving shift from being a tradesperson of twelve years’ solid industrial experience where he had total control, to now facing the new role of trainee, was uncomfortable: Before teaching I was a worker on the shop floor, highly skilled really, turning out parts on a lathe to exact tolerances. I was used to a neat, logical and tidy world, but I got a shock when I came into teaching, I had expected to receive a proper syllabus but they gave me bugger-all. It seems almost illogical to me. I felt lost for weeks. Other unexpected jolts, many in the area of human relationships, also awaited the trainee-teachers. Many were openly hostile and full of caustic comments about the Teachers’ College intake of overseas students. Many employed racist comments such as ‘slopes’ to put down the Asian students studying at the Teachers’ College. They often passed many derogatory comments about females, and others held equally dismissive views of their students in their schools. Such comments were considered very amusing by almost all of the trainees, and underpin the mateship themes of a predominantly male group facing occupational change and stress; sticking together in the face of adversity becomes paramount. The well-known and thus comfortable familiarity of previous occupational roles where they had spent many years was now becoming problematic. Coping with these various changes presented many difficulties for trainee teachers. They were faced with all the uncertainties of education which more experienced teachers simply take for granted. They perceived a lack of direction within teaching as work, and they often unfavourably compared their new role with their previous goal-oriented years spent in industry. For example, electrical wiring is an occupation renowned for requiring its workers to adhere to a formal, legal and highly structured set of electrical procedures enshrined in codified sets of By-Laws. These are

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strictly enforceable in law by site-visiting Inspectors representing the State Electricity Commission of Victoria. Tim, steeped in this tradition, used an appropriate metaphor to describe his first days in a school during the Induction Program: ‘I got a bloody shock, really. The kids were just loafing around, not working, doing nothing, they didn’t seem at all productive to me’. Tim’s early impression was that the classroom dynamics he saw violated his unwritten but oftstated code of ‘a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay’. This expression underpins the industrial workethic of many tradespersons. Similar comments are expressed many times by the trainees about their students’ behaviour as they settle into the education system. In this way they compare the values observed in their new workplace against the familiar values of industry. Tim did not face his transition difficulties alone. Des, 37 years old, one of the two oldest interns interviewed, worked for twenty years with Telecom prior to teaching. He describes his feelings upon resigning: ‘I found it a bit traumatic after twenty years to quit Telecom. It was hard leaving a situation where I knew everyone, to suddenly become a nobody’. Indeed, to ‘…suddenly become a nobod…’ is a poignant cry at any time, but coming from adults who possess well established prior work histories, it rings cruelly on the ears as doubly-distressing. It means that any attempt to resocialize mature-age tradespersons into a new career and occupational role causes profound problems of adjustment. While these problems are well aired among trainee-teachers, they largely remain unknown to outsiders; thus they fester and work on their nerves because they are never resolved. A feeling by tradespersons of a lack of suitable recognition of the tradie identity on the part of bureaucratic officialdom grates harshly on their raw nerves. One such bureaucratic slap in the face occurred to Rick at the immediate post-interview stage. The Victorian Ministry of Education offered Rick a place in a school on a salary five thousand dollars below his then current annual income. The offer came at a critical decision making stage, right at the moment Rick was contemplating entering teaching, turning over and over in his mind the decision to change careers. ‘It hit me like a bloody hammer blow’, he remarked ruefully. ‘I screwed their bloody offer up and threw it in the sink in disgust. I’m worth more than a bloody pittance, which is what I felt they were offering’. His sharp reaction is important to an understanding of the occupational resocialization of adult tradespersons. Clearly, a feeling of high self-status underpin his remarks. The issue, however, was resolved when Rick cooled down and negotiated a more acceptable salary. He presented solid arguments to the Education Ministry officials based on his considerable trade experience and qualifications: ‘Considering I was not only giving up a lot of money, but also a vehicle and cheap rent in a Water Board house, any new job had to be a lot better. This was bloody worse. The missus wasn’t as angry as I was, she kept on at me to give it a try’. While support and succour came from those persons close to trainee-teachers undergoing stress, it was also forthcoming quickly, as shall be seen, from the cohort members themselves whenever anyone in the group faced a problem. Orientation School Visits: Teacher/Student Relations When the noviciates visited orientation schools prior to taking over their own classes, it was observed that the experienced practical studies teachers sometimes discussed their pupils in derogatory terms. The trainee-teachers listened in silence to one typical conversation concerning student discipline:

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Teacher A: I’m pissed off with the ban on the strap. It’s a real pity as they need a good dose of it now and then. Mind you, I think only one person in the school should administer it. Teacher B: Well, now that we can’t strap them, after lunch I’m going to have my whole class sit with their hands on their heads until I find out who pinched that battery last week. For the most part the trainees were mildly amused and somewhat surprised at some of the things they saw while visiting the orientation schools. But the purpose behind the school visits, observation of the experienced teachers, meant that they became mildly anxious about how they themselves would cope with certain aspects of their new career: Bill: I took a group of girls for their introduction session of Mechanical Appreciation. I was glad to be doing something at last, but I felt really uncomfortable, because I’m only used to working with blokes, and all these sheilas make me feel funny, it’s the same even at College. I’m not really sure how to relate to them. Bill’s comment and demeanour reflect a fear of working closely with females. While attending the College, the cohort’s defences when dealing with females consisted of passing sexist comments and making sexist jokes in order to cope with the threat their presence presented. Defense is essentially the ego’s function and task. Freud (1894:87– 172) introduced the concept of defense in his The Neuro-Psychoses of Defense as one of the various means the psyche uses to prevent unwanted ideas from entering consciousness. This theme is developed further in Mealyea (1989a:311–33) in a discussion of trade teachers struggling with the stress of a career transition. The ‘Vegies’ Syndrome: Labelling Students One trainee reported receiving a considerable surprise during his particular orientation school visit: Doug: I went to the sheetmetal workshop and the teacher in there had a row of seats, like bar stools, bolted down to the floor all the way along a bench. The kids who do not want to do any work get sent there to just sit. He calls it his ‘vegie patch’. ‘This is where my little vegies sit and vegetate’, he said. I think it would work all right because they couldn’t interfere with the other kids working. This bloke’s a bloody character, he’s been in the system for years and has attended every inservice course under the sun. His room is set up like a rat maze, with more stools and tables bolted down like a tunnel and the kids have to walk through them to get anywhere. He calls it his ‘Behaviour Modification Room’. He’s even got signs around the room saying Turn Left Here’ and so on, it was a bloody circus. The term ‘vegie’ was so admired by the trainees that it entered their argot and was consistently used by them—and also by some of their school workshop colleagues—to describe certain students. The meaning of the term, clear enough through its use, was defined one day by a senior teacher: ‘The kids haven’t got much meat to them, like vegetables they are a bit light on’. The term, one among many other dozens of similar derogatory general terms used, is typical of the workshop teacher’s vernacular (Mealyea, 1988:227–94). While it is aimed at denigrating students’ intellectual abilities, it also serves another important purpose. Once labelled as ‘vegies’, the students can then be isolated from the rest of the group and put to one side, as in the above description of the behaviour

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modification room. Such a view is clearly based on an unquestioned assumption of a deficit model of learning. Of the group dynamics prevailing among teachers observed in schools, one intern remarked: ‘I’m amazed at how the tradies and the academics seem to be separated, they even have smoko and lunch in separate areas’. The specific factors contributing to the separation and marginalization of teachers is discussed following the section below. Settling In Together at the Teachers’ College, after the school visits, the trainees were anxious to start teaching. They believed they were quite ready to take classes, a view based on possession of their trade skills and deep attachment to vocationalism. Because they felt they were employed specifically to teach what they are already good at, naturally they asked: Why the delay? From their viewpoint, this is understandable. Based on their orientation-school classroom observations, they felt that they could easily teach the practical subject content, and correctly at that. Nevertheless, they had some natural anxiety about classroom discipline. But the essential thing they learned from the school observation visits was that teaching did not appear to be all that difficult. As more than one trainee remarked immediately they took over their own classes: ‘It’s good to be doing something at last’. This is a natural reaction of active people used to a busy work day. But settling in to College work was more problematic than anticipated. The interns quickly labelled the academic side of the College work as ‘whackademic bullshit’. While holding few expectations about the nature of the College work, to a person they had expected the College staff would at least show them very quickly how to teach. They also had difficulty with what they regarded as some of the College staff’s negative views regarding vocationalism. One trainee referred to the challenge to his industrial worldview as ‘frightening’. Another nervous intern spoke for almost the total cohort when he remarked: ‘I now realize that I’ve not only changed my job, I’m changing my whole life. I hope it’s going to be for the best’. Doug also spoke for the total cohort when he likened teaching training to being an apprentice all over again, a low status stage previously passed through by the trainees years earlier while learning their trade. They had little appetite for repeating the experience. Furthermore, their desire to rush into the classroom in the belief that teaching trade subjects would be easy underwent an enormous re-evaluation following the antics of a few rowdy, recalcitrant students. The fact that no prepared curriculum was forthcoming for their use in their classroom also upset many. Describing it as his own way of ‘getting on top of teaching’, Doug treated these unexpected problems in much the same way he handled day-to-day problems confronted in his former industrial occupation: Well, one thing about industry was that you had time to weigh up a problem, to think out a solution, to nut out the pros and cons of getting out of trouble or around a hurdle. You could even look up the answer in a book or manual. Often you drew on your past experiences. You could phone the office, or see the architect

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During his extensive industrial experience, Doug had evolved a set of useful survival techniques while solving work-related trade problems. Laying this approach on teaching like a template, he tried to follow the contours like a well worn path, tracing around its periphery in an effort to solve his new occupational problems. Utilizing such an approach to a problem has certain value. Possessing the solutions to one’s workrelated problems means that one is prepared and thus able to approach any issue, and ultimately means that a person can cope with unexpected problems that may arise. By drawing on his own trade experiences to solve problems encountered, Doug confirms Hargreaves’ (1984:224–54) point about how teachers think about their work when they claim that: ‘experience counts, theory doesn’t’. As Doug remarked during one interview: ‘You can forget that educational psychology wank. I reckon you know you are becoming a teacher when you have in your head half a dozen ways of solving a problem’. But some trainee-teachers were scared and nervous for other reasons. Mario, proud of his trade skills and working-class background, expressed concern about the negative effect teaching might possibly have on him: I can see that I’ll have to work hard on trying to remain me, if that is clear. I don’t want to turn into someone else mate, a snob, just because I’m a school teacher. I feel self-conscious of saying to anyone that I’m a teacher. I prefer to say I’m a trade teacher. I don’t want to come across to people that I think that I’m better than they are. My cousin is a teacher and he’s a real smart-arse. At the finish of teacher education (two years), Mario left teaching and returned to his old job in industry. At the time of writing, industry has reclaimed almost half of the cohort. This fact in itself points to the frustration experienced during the career transition from tradesperson to teacher. Teaching Practical Studies: Gender Issues Each had their own particular trial to cope with as a result of entering teaching. For all of his working life, Jock’s fellow workers were males. As already discussed, he confessed to feeling unsure about how to cope with so many females at the College. ‘I might go bloody blind’, he said one hot day in the cafe while staring at women wearing casual summer gear. Female students are increasingly choosing practical subjects in secondary schools, and Jock’s subject, woodwork, is a popular choice. Indeed, the prospect of teaching female students was put to Jock at his pre-entry interview. His choice of words as he recounted his response to the question is revealing: They kept asking me if I felt I could cope with co-educational classes. Well, I couldn’t care less, I felt the girls were just as good as the boys, and I have since proved that in my classes. Anyway, they then asked me a hypothetical question, they asked ‘What would I think the reason would be if in a Year 10 group, only one girl turned up for woodwork, how would I account for it?’ Well, I thought, it was a pretty tricky question. Jesus, I thought, ‘What are they driving at?’ So I said perhaps the boys had put a sign up at the door saying ‘Apartheid. No bloody sheilas allowed’. This really broke them up, they thought it was a tremendous answer.

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I then said I would try to lift the curtain, tell the boys that the girls are just as good as them, to give them a go. Inner Turmoil Bill, an automotive teacher, found his early days in teaching to be far different from his expectations. Employing appropriate industrial metaphors, he groped for ways of expressing his feelings of inner turmoil: Jeez, I’m running on empty most of the time. In the trade I knew exactly what to do, after twelve years I had everything worked out, I could manipulate all the work to suit myself. But this job is different, there are kids spread all over the workshop at school. Also, I’m a qualified tradesman, keen to pass on my knowledge and skills to the kids, and I got a shock to see that the reality is somewhat different, like teaching’s almost alien to the trade which I had been serving. At the start there were times of tension and uncertainty, but I’m getting the nuts and bolts of it now, I think. I’ll be firing on all six cylinders in no bloody time, my oath I will. It’s not gunna get me down. My own kids were very excited about me being a teacher, they were running around telling everyone. Last week I was working on the father-in-law’s car and my boy said ‘Hey dad, what are ya doin’ that for, you’re a teacher, not a mechanic any more’. They were so excited they were telling everyone. Country-born and bred, Bill’s move to the city presented enormous day-to-day problems which he felt most city-born people simply ignore. He recalled his mood upon coping with city life in his own earthy style: I didn’t even know where to park the car when I hit the College. Fair dinkum, I was so churned up I couldn’t even crap, my body just wasn’t functioning properly. I didn’t shit for over a week. Jeez I was a mess. I bloody walked to work before, and we had a company house. I kept wonderin’ if I was goin’ to get a parking ticket. His choice of terminology served to describe not only his state of health and feelings most graphically, it proved to be prophetic. Bill’s descriptive language reflected the thoughts and feelings of many of the interns during the early settling-in stages. At least half a dozen others reported suffering similar symptoms of gastrointestinal upset, a natural response to inner tension. There was more to come. Erosion of Vocationalism: The Onset of Fear Of the dozens of schools visited by the researcher, staff adhered solidly to the current, narrow vocationalism curriculum. As a result, they parroted the views of their school supervisors, who in turn directly aimed their criticisms at the Ministry’s proposed reforms, the introduction of Technology Studies:

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This stuff about technology studies is all a wank from someone in head office. It’s going to completely fuck up trade teaching in schools if it gets through, so I reckon we oughta work against it. This quote reflects a fear of an attack on vocationalism. A certain amount of hysteria is present in the remark ‘…we oughta work against it’. Fear of the unknown is also behind such a comment. In retaliation, preservation of a particular pedagogical style requires tradies to engage in maintenance of self-definition. But they admit to a feeling of working against almost insurmountable odds as their ‘tradie’ status is challenged and threatened. These feelings, evident in the loudly voiced resentment directed at the Ministry’s proposed reforms to practical education by the experienced practical studies teachers in the training schools, are presented more fully for an important reason. Such insights indicate they are more than simply letting off steam. They provide tremendous psychological support to the trainee-teachers, thus contributing to reproduction in the classroom. They also underpin the marginalization these teachers experience in their schools. The Influence of the School Workshop Sub-culture The constant standby remark: ‘In the long run we are all tradies and should never forget it’, is a telling indication of how the interns define themselves as occupiers of a particular occupational and social role. This comment emerged early during teacher training, and gained in strength precisely because it underpins their daily teaching role in the schools. It is a role strongly specified by their school supervisors (Mealyea, 1990a, in press). One other important relevant factor, the physical layout of the school workshops as a sub-culture in relation to the rest of the school culture, confirms and reinforces this ideological position. For a period of more than two years, data were gathered from experienced classroom teachers concerning their views of a shift from vocationalism to Technology Studies. These teachers also offered unsolicited opinions about another related reform to practical teaching, the introduction of the Teachers’ College new four-year BEd (Technology) degree. There is great heat in their feelings and opinions. Obviously, along with the introduction of Technology Studies, the BEd is also of great concern to practical subject teachers. Most of the comments, either made personally to the researcher, or overheard in other conversations between teachers by the researcher, are illuminating. They centre around one main fear, a loss of teachers’ trade skills due to the demise of vocationalism confronting schools. In the .words of a concerned teacher: Technology Studies is a lot of bullshit, it’s going to make the workshops too academic for the type of kids we get. Technology Studies will take the emphasis of our workshops away from the trade, and then Australia will be short of good tradesmen. This remark has elements of students as ‘vegies’ behind the words ‘…the type of kids we get’. This, too, is based on a deficit model.

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Furthermore, the choice of the word ‘tradesmen’ indicates more than a fear of teachers losing their traditional role, it embodies overtones of what the utterer considers as the appropriate tradesperson gender. Further examples of concerns about coming changes to practical teaching were collected during staff meetings of trade teachers. Charles, scapegoated by the cohort because he actively supported the Teachers’ College new BEd programme, also experienced the same form of rejection by his school colleagues. The extract below provides an insight into the thinking of those rejecting the changes, and why Charles attracted a lot of negative attention: Senior Teacher: I’m not very keen on the new four-year BEds coming here to this school for their training, they’re doing this tech studies thing at the College so they’ll be a lot of eggheads mainly, with none of our practical trade experience, they just won’t be able to match us. In fact, they’ll be no good after four years at College until we get our hands on them and retrain them. I know what I’m saying is true, because I run night classes here in my evening woodwork classes for those wankers from Tennyson State College that have done the arts and crafts course as teachers. They just love what I’m teaching them. In my classes I give them all the skills they never got years ago in their course. They rush back to their private schools and their high schools and rave about how good our course is, saying no one ever showed them how to make things properly. I reckon they are typical of how the four-year BEds will be, bloody hopeless. So I feel it’ll be a case of us carrying them until they learn the right way. The emotional expression ‘…eggheads…who just won’t be able to match us’, and the view ‘…we’ll have to give them the skills to fix them up’ constitute powerful evidence of these teachers’ selfperception, and their threatened status, as they perceive their role in the curriculum. Typical of this type of school staff meeting is that the scarce time allotted is almost always entirely given over to issues of workshop maintenance, and the policing of the appropriate codes of student behaviour and dress in the workshops. There is almost no emphasis on the Ministry’s proposed reforms to the practical curriculum other than to complain negatively in uninformed terms. These brusque comments were by no means peculiar to one particular school. For example, in another training school, the following remark was made to the researcher by a practical studies teacher: I’ve heard all about these new degree teachers, the four-year ones coming out of the College in a few years and I reckon they’ll be really terrific in our schools because they’ll be the same level of fucking intelligence as the kids they’ll be teaching, so they’ll get on real well with them. A head of a department, this person is responsible for weekly supervision of new trainee-teachers over a two-year period. He is the most senior member of staff in the school, and a man with long supervision experience of the College’s trade trainees. He was, at the time the remark was passed, supervising a trainee. Such explanations senior staff offer of their pupils’ behaviour are extraordinarily naive and based on an unquestioned obedience to, and the acceptance of, unsophisticated deficit theories of education. One can see the evidence of this in their disparaging

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remarks. (For confirmation of these viewpoints thoroughly pervading practical secondary education in the UK setting, see: Gleeson, D., 1981. On the same issue but from within another educational setting, see Hatton, 1988:341; Connell, 1985.) These disparaging remarks are the most serious immediate constraints of the new workplace faced by the trainee-teachers. In these negative pronouncements of secondary school students, no understanding exists of contemporary pedagogic or social theory regarding deficit theory or integration of persons who are disabled; there is only the smell of fear. This teacher’s negative attitude toward change is clear in another remark which he passed about a girl who had approached him during the above conversation, providing further insight into the fear underpinning his reasons for resisting change in the practical studies area: See that poor bitch over there that just came up then? She’s two bob short in the shilling and that’s the whole problem with schools today, they should have them locked up, they shouldn’t be in the school. I only entertain the kids now. There was a time I used to get them all ready for apprenticeships, but now there are just too many kids out there for the jobs available. Once I used to get ten or a dozen calls a year from my old mates out there asking me for kids for apprenticeships and I could place every kid I wanted, now that’s all gone, no one telephones me anymore. This teacher’s source of pride and community spirit is derived from providing, with his own hands, top students for apprenticeships. This wellspring is fed from deep within his own craft background. Mourning and melancholic, he is angry at confronting an impending loss of the old craft ways and what this will mean to how he sees and feels about himself. Further, he laments the loss of the old and trusted networks he once tapped into to help his students gain a job. There is sadness in the words‘…no one telephones me anymore’. Similar comments were made by many other experienced trade teachers interviewed. One in particular discussed his own specific concern, maintaining workshop safety in the face of change: How well trained do you reckon the new breed of teachers will be in cutting up and preparing all the material for the kids’ jobs? They’ll probably cut off their own hands. And how are they going to go scrounging material for the school’s workshops from factories. Like, I’ve still got all me old contacts and we go around with the trailer in the school holidays and pick up heaps of stuff, these new blokes will have no old mates in the trade to scrounge from like we all have, it’s one of our big advantages coming from a trade background, something no one can take away from us. Fear for both teacher and student safety, and a concern for the maintenance of a version of the oldboy network, come through in this comment. There is also a certain amount of pride in his description of what can be drawn out of a trade background. While his concern is understandable, the sentiments appear negative in the face of the proposed reforms to the practical area, and are destructive of the assistance sorely needed to support trainee-teachers. Of all those interviewed during the school visits, not one single constructive remark was made by practical teachers about either the Education Ministry’s proposed reforms, or the College’s new BEd

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programme, apart from one school where they were greeted favourably. However, teachers usually have sound reasons for their attitudes, and those presented here spring from a mixture of deepseated feelings of loss of occupational status, and fear and ignorance about change thrust upon teachers from Ministry of Education bureaucrats. There are, however, one or two limited and minor differences to these negative attitudes. For example, in one particular training school, a senior trade teacher, relatively sympathetic to the reforms, said: Well, it seems there are big changes coming, in fact I reckon they are almost on us, and it’s obvious we are not here solely for trade reasons, but the Ministry is not providing much help apart from saying we have to do it, and that makes people shitty. Of course, all the parents of our kids come from a full employment era and that’s what they want for their kids, so they pressure us too, in this school’s intake area they want apprenticeships for their kids. The Ministry’s guidelines are too general and no one helps by telling us what to do, so they are useless. At our school we are trying to make years 7 to 10 general education and 11 to 12 more vocationally targeted to get them jobs. Among the related themes in this quote is the community’s perception of the purpose of schooling. This particular purpose is influential, as it reinforces the workshop subculture’s vocational ideology. Teachers are exhorted by the media and their school administrators to pay attention to the community’s needs. The problem remains that whether these needs are vocational or otherwise, they are often interpreted, by the workshop teachers at least, as employer’s needs which should be met unquestioningly. Prospect of Support for Vocationalism: Hope Emerges From the Teachers’ College, some hope of assistance of the specific type sought by the traineeteachers, thoroughly unnerved by the continuing attack on vocationalism, seemed forthcoming. For example, one particular Syllabus Studies lecturer stated specifically and categorically the way in which he expected them to teach, claiming that adoption of his classroom techniques, with a focus on vocationalism, would solve their pressing problems and thus ease their stress. Such forms of clear instruction made them happy because the lecturer’s approach met their needs. From this type of instruction they felt a warm ray of light shine on their almost overwhelming concerns, evident in the cheerful comment of one of the group: This is just what I want, someone who at last will tell me what to do. No one here will give us any answers… I want to be told what to do. I’m really enjoying this session (spoken with head thrown back, smiling, with arms held upwards and forwards, seemingly in supplication). Thus, in the short-term they were relatively happy and able to settle down somewhat. But the continual threat posed to vocationalism by the Ministry’s proposed reforms demands a significant change to interns’ and experienced teachers’ dimensions of occupational self-identity which is inconsistent with the continued integrity of that identity. The Ministry of Education, and supporting

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sections of the Teachers’ College, continually posed a threat by challenging the principles underpinning the integrity of each tradesperson’s occupational identity. This threat was received collectively by the cohort studied. Such a combined threat challenges who they are, leading to significant psychological turmoil. This was primarily manifested and ameliorated in joking and humour of certain types. Humour as a Coping Mechanism A coping strategy, as defined by Breakwell (1986:78) is ‘Any activity, in thought or deed, which has as its goal the removal or modification of a threat to identity…’ Among the main writers on coping strategies in educational settings are Woods (1979, 1981, and 1984); Lacey (1977); Pollard (1982); Hargreaves (1977, 1978, and 1979); and Sikes et al. (1985). These writers have considered how teachers and pupils negotiate and come to terms with structurally generated constraints by exploring teacher and pupil creativity in managing their worlds. To date, Mealyea’s (1988) research is the only study of mature-age, technical teacher-trainees’, coping strategies. Although the transition experience from tradesperson to teacher is harsh, this is not to say that the process is humourless. As Woods (1979:22) has pointed out in another context, ‘Pupils “have their laughs” and teachers “fraternize”, or use humour as an instrument of policy’. Interns passing through a difficult career transition also have their laughs. They use certain types of humour to cope with the demands of the College. The major type of humour used is that which enables them to ‘get through’ some of the more trying lectures, dissipating some of the tensions when the discussion becomes too far removed from what they describe as the ‘real’ world. They also use humour which serves to reinforce and strengthen existing mateship themes. Such humour often surfaces in the form of racist, anti-feminist and sexist jokes. In this way, as a group they laugh at, and not with, others. Through laughter, and there was plenty of it within the cohort studied, mature-age traineeteachers resist the incursions of what they see as the College’s attack on their occupational selfidentity, and thus get through the day a lot more easily than would otherwise be the case. Humour serves as a powerful means of catharsis. Mealyea (1989a:311–33) examines more fully the use of humour as a coping strategy in tradespersons undergoing a career transition from industry to education. Significance of Mateship and Humour Briefly, due to administrative convenience, the organizational structure of the Teachers’ College diploma course, with its grouping together of mainly male tradespersons, allows of no proper opportunity for the men to become involved with women at any level of social or work interaction. In short, the ‘streaming’ of mainly homogeneous groups allows little in the way of any challenge to occur to their industrial worldview. It is clear in the data that trainee-teachers adopt ‘collectivizing’ strategies so that personally experienced problems are shared by the group, and the displacement of blame is legitimized through collective opinions through projection, described by Wells (1980:174–80). The collective group strategy adopted by the interns was displaced aggression through humour. This served to maintain

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the group solidarity legitimized by Australian mateship norms, and by idealizing the industrial workplace: the ‘real’ world. By adopting a strategy which served the purpose of closing ranks and presenting a united front while under duress, they chose the long-term goal of sustaining identity rather than the short-term pragmatic goal of Becker’s (1961) medical students who acquiesced passively to meet the immediate pressing demands of formal medical examinations. Of course, Becker’s medical students brought no well-defined ‘prior-occupational culture’ to their training as do the mature-age trainee-teachers who, furthermore, are not required to sit for formal examinations as Becker’s interns were compelled to do. But the two different cases show that such strategies of acquiescence and resistance both facilitate credentialling in higher education. While male teachers dominate the teaching in school workshops, more importantly, due to the isolating nature of the school architecture, they are separated from the potential influence of female teachers and that of other subject teachers. Thus isolated, a male enclave is created which inhibits the development of mature attitudes towards females; an unquestioning acceptance of male supremacy follows, which also contributes further to their isolation within the broader working functions of the school. Identity is tied to work (Warr, 1984), and is in large measure determined by work. Most people accept work as an essential part of their lives, and for tradespersons, work is economically, socially and psychologically necessary for a sense of worth and achievement (Gleeson, P., 1990). This is clear in the contemporary psychological research on the debilitating effects of unemployment. Jahoda’s (1979:309–14; 1982) deprivation model describes the typical reactions to job loss, which include social isolation, mental and physical illness and, in keeping with this study, a sense of loss of self-esteem. The cost of holding sexist values results not only in a lack of self growth for male tradies, it creates the linchpin of their resistance due to their fear of a potential loss of self. The prime concern facing mature-age tradespersons becoming teachers is their potentially new occupational status defined for them by others. To their dismay the College, in pushing Technology Studies, appears to devalue their trade skills, an action which they perceive as a personal attack. In addition to financial rewards, employment meets strong latent functions of self-esteem and personal status (Freud, 1930). Consequently, tradespersons see the changes to work confronting them to be a denial of themselves, and they respond negatively. The strength with which they reject the proposed changes and what the proposals might mean to their self-identity is reflected in how heart-felt their responses are to their new situation. One angry trainee-teacher’s heated response, directed at a lecturer who had pointed out that most of the trade subjects face a decline in secondary schools, is a typical reaction: ‘Well, if we are not teaching trade subjects [indicating the rest of the group with a sweep of the hand], if our subject is not there for trade reasons, what the hell is it there for?’ In trying to cope with the changes facing them, they call upon their prior occupational experiences. The specific expertise they bring to schools as tradespersons is simply refocused around their teaching. Notions of a new role for practical teachers are anathema to most of them, as it is to their school workshop colleagues. Thus they turn their allegiance to their training school workshop sub-culture, and heartily support the pedagogical style found therein. We move now to an examination of how this process is compounded by the particular and specific style of school architecture.

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The Architecture of Isolation For most of the working day, academic and trade teachers are physically, and ideologically, separated from each other. Physical separation is caused by the isolating nature of the architecture of practical workshops. Thus for decades, practical teachers have taught classes divorced from the mainstream curriculum. Recognizing this as a problem, the Education Ministry as part of the reforms to practical studies, in Ministerial Paper Number 6, (Ministry of Education, 1985) argues for a revision of curriculum guidelines by proposing that important links need to be developed in schools between areas of learning which are currently taught as separate entities. Such a move is crucial in achieving the proposed reforms. The nature of the school architecture, and the workshop teachers’ ideological beliefs regarding education, create a powerful atmosphere of restraint to change, for student and teacher alike. However, any causal link between the restraints of the current architecture of schooling and the educational ideological orientation of workshop teachers takes second place to the primacy of the prior occupational worldview tradies bring to teaching. Indeed, committed to narrow vocationalism, tradies see only advantages in being separated from other subject teachers within the school, as this is in full accord with their desire to be well away from the ‘academic wankers’. As a result, trade teachers are confined into ghettos. School architecture and teachers’ ideology act as a moral force. That current school buildings throughout the State bear such remarkable design similarities speaks to the appropriate curriculum inherent in the vocational protagonists’ worldview. Built into the design of the architectural cellular units is the atmosphere of psychological restraint impeding change. This is one of the greatest problems the reformers, lacking in sufficient funds to transform school buildings, currently face. Separated, the two educational sub-cultures, academic and tradie, view each other across a chasm of deep suspicion and often with open hostility. Documented here is sufficient evidence to show the disdain in which tradies hold academics. This hostility is often mutual, however, for academics also are not shy in airing their somewhat negative view of the tradie demeanour. For example, a trainee-teacher, while relaxing in the College cafe repeated, with a certain amount of pride in his voice, an English teacher’s comment made at a school staff meeting: ‘At our school the “accos” have a name for us. They call us “John Wayne toilet paper”. They reckon we are rough and tough and don’t take no shit from injuns’. Trade teachers who seek to work uncritically within their vocational paradigm latch on to such criticisms as a basis of arguing for the retention of current building designs which separate the teaching sub-cultures. Thus this wish, and the negative typical ‘acco’ quote concerning tradies, is only one selected from abundant evidence of each subculture’s view of the other. But the Ministry’s proposed subject-integrated workshop designs for schools (at present, except for a few isolated cases, confined to the drawing board) demonstrate a wish to overcome subject isolation and teacher marginalization, and to foster a concerted approach toward education and thus pupils’ learning. While a few isolated attempts by enthusiastic teachers to bridge the gap between the two teaching subcultures is under way (Mealyea, 1990b), it remains to be seen if a permanent alliance based on a shared ideological view of education can be forged. The introduction of Technology Studies requires a distinctive style of architectural school plan to support materially the Ministry’s proposed pedagogic ‘atmosphere’. This is vital and necessary to enable a new set of social relations among teachers, and between teachers and students, to emerge. Such changes to current school architecture must be more than simple incidental or peripheral

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details incorporated into a building plan as finishing decorative touches only (such as the recent superficial name changes to various subject workshops, which are of cosmetic value only: see Mealyea, 1990b). The mooted structural changes are central to the Ministry’s educational reform concerns, an essential means of establishing the ‘tone’ necessary to reflect the change from vocationalism to a more general, student-centred and subject-integrated focused curriculum. With the advent of the Ministry’s proposed reforms to practical teaching, never before has such a conducive climate existed of close collaboration between academics and tradies. Teachers’ responses toward a different form of school architecture is one way of measuring their engagement with the problem. Indeed, the recognition of common pedagogical problems is the first step in a process of liberty from the ghettos. But as the architectural designs are yet to be a reality on any scale, it is impossible to say to what extent these aims will be realized. A lack of finances is quoted as the excuse by the Ministry officials in the face of mild criticism by some teachers concerning delays in tearing down the old and establishing new and more appropriate buildings. Notwithstanding the financial difficulties, those within the Education Ministry who support reform to practical subjects believe that a new design for practical work-shops is a prerequisite if educational effectiveness of the type desired is to come about. Evidence for such an optimistic view of tying architecture to desired social and attitudinal reforms exists. As long ago as the 1790s, from within a prison context, there were those who believed that architectural plans themselves could either embody and enhance, or frustrate, the purpose of prison as regards security and thus exercise of control, or provide proper reform, of the prisoners (Howard, 1792). Such ‘fitting the building to its purposes’ is not only confined to prisons. In his book Managing The Mind, Donnelly (1983:48–76) tracks the changes in thought regarding the design of asylums and the care of inmates. He argues that reforms in the architecture of asylums itself influences different ways of thinking about health care for the patients. That building styles evoke psychological ‘moods’ is a theme well understood by architects, and has been drawn on by people as diverse as Hitler through to modernday promoters of large-scale entertainment events in an attempt to evoke the desired responses in their audiences. The design of current school workshops, including the manner in which trade teachers deck them out similarly, certainly embody a desired ‘mood’, as observations of these classrooms clearly show. The way in which the teachers mould and dress bare workshop classrooms, including the walls as well as the open floor space, into quasiindustrial settings, forms a comprehensible pattern. Tradespersons enter teaching with a’presenting culture’ (Goffman, 1968), and understanding and evaluation of their position in the would which is used as the basis for interpreting their new occupational environment. By festooning the walls with industrial material they are expressing what they believe to be the proper purpose of such work settings. This in turn underpins the social relations they form with other subject teachers, with workshop teachers, and between themselves and students, not to mention the impact on trainee-teachers immersed in the same settings. As a result, any top-down attempt by either the Ministry of Education or the Teachers’ College to alter such a perspective is fraught with risk, and is fiercely resisted. Trainees, immersed in the practical workshop milieu while becoming teachers, find confirmation of self. They are formed as teachers within the closed universe of a specific, narrow technical type. Further, that they tend to work in ways that accommodate rather than transcend the constraints of

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teachers’ work is a typically rational, although limited, response to teachers’ work as they view it. During training they fight hard to sustain their occupational status brought to education. Thus radical change of the type proposed by the Ministry of Education is resisted, for one’s former worldview cannot be lightly discarded; the new cannot be instantly put on. For support, they draw on the industrial needs of the community arguing that these are still as relevant today as when they trained. But they ignore current significant trends occurring in the socioeconomic backgrounds of apprentices presenting for apprenticeships. Youth from upper-middle and professional-class socio-economic backgrounds are increasingly presenting for apprenticeships, once the traditional occupation of working-class students (Mealyea, 1985:27–36). One significant reason underlying a root cause behind this shift in apprentices’ socio-economic backgrounds, or ‘statuscreep’, is explained by Hughes (1987:5), who argues it is partly caused by employers’ response to the problem of high unemployment: …employers become more selective and put their selective criteria in the shape of higher educational requirements. These may be general, in the form of more years of education. They may be specific, in the demand for higher levels of basic skills. Students and parents, formerly seeing education as a direct access to work, express disenchantment when the link fails to work. Dissatisfactions formerly unexpressed become substantial complaints. For their part, teachers feel aggrieved as they see themselves being blamed for a shortage of jobs, a shortage they would explain in terms of structural changes in employment, and not a lack of appropriate skills. They argue that their role as teachers means they must ‘give’ their students the ‘right’ skills in order to help them compete effectively against all comers seeking apprenticeships, in the face of lack of knowledge about those from non-traditional backgrounds. Their wish to ‘ready’ students for industrial roles seems difficult. Due to a lack of opportunity in updating their own industrial experience, most secondary practical studies teachers are woefully ignorant of the needs of modern industry. No empirical data exists of the extent of this problem in the secondary teaching area, but one thing is certain, many of these teachers have not set foot in an industrial setting for many years. There is, however, recent evidence from a study of their TAFE counterparts which shows that of a survey of 400 male TAFE teachers involved in vocationalism, 70 per cent have not been employed in industry for at least a decade. Of this group, 48 per cent registered concern and admitted ignorance about proposed changes to apprenticheship training. Furthermore, 75 per cent of the staff surveyed would, if given the opportunity, prefer 1–3 months industrial release to update their knowledge and skills (Victorian Building and Construction Industry Training Board, 1990: no page numbering). This is instructive. Although from outside the secondary teaching area, the teachers surveyed come from the same industrial backgrounds and see themselves as having the same teaching role, (although in the TAFE area), as the tradies herein. Given the lack of recent contact with industry, would their pronouncements, regarding students’ needs be relevant to modern industry’s needs?

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Influence of Groupthink Reluctance and unnecessary (in their eyes) attendance at the College presents risks to the occupational identity of tradespersons. They fight all the way against what they perceive as the negative influence of the College by drawing enormous strength from the group: You know, if we didn’t have each other to fall back on, this’d be a prick of a place all round… The only good thing about coming to the mushroom farm is the others really, we can sit and have a rap about our problems and get it all off our chests, I see that as the main function of the College, really. Well it has been for me, anyway. Group processes, adopted by an intern cohort as a sanctuary and support in a threatening situation, is a key point of relevance to the broader issue of career transition of tradespersons becoming teachers. While the limits of space do not allow a full discussion, the brief overview following below provides a vantage point from which the process can be further understood. But for further details and analysis, see Mealyea (1988:437–98) for concepts associated with Kleinian psychoanalysis (Klein, 1932; 1955; Klein and Riviere, 1964; Jacques, 1955), as these writers provide a felicitous theoretical framework for understanding group processes in an organizational context. Research evidence (Mealyea, 1988) shows that the trainee-teachers’ behaviour is formed by the influence of their membership group in the context of strains encountered during status passage transition within teacher education, rather than a response to being victims of a particular socialclass background. Trainee-teachers define their experience at the Teachers’ College in terms of fear and loathing. They feel they are being forced to attend, to ‘put in time’ against their will, an unwelcome official requirement of gaining a diploma. They rarely discuss the experience in terms of intrinsic value. They do not describe College attendance in terms of increasing their knowledge and personal understandings towards becoming professional teachers. To exacerbate the problem, some of the Teachers’ College staff describe the trainees’ behaviour as lazy, ignorant or stupid, often implying that they are victims of their industrial backgrounds. One senior member of staff described one particular recalcitrant group as ‘knuckle-draggers’. But explaining away of trainee-teacher resistance using deficit language only rubs salt into the wound. Such beliefs held by others of them may well lead to increased resistance and, worse, act as further confirmation of their initial and preferred definition of academics as ‘whackademics’. Membership groups exert a strong influence on the attitudes and actions of individuals (Sherif and Sherif, 1967). Indeed, the trainee-teachers reported over and over again that they were able to function effectively only as a result of the group’s support while attending the Teachers’ College, primarily because the group served as a secure sanctuary. This also enabled them to preserve their previous industrial workplace values, expressed in comments such as: ‘We are all tradies, doing the same thing and going through the same sorts of experiences, we couldn’t have made it without each other’s support’. And: ‘I find real strength in the group, they are all like me, have my interests, it’s a great help to be part of the group’. While the means by which the group attains solidarity and thus presents a united front to the world can be explained by describing the purpose of their humour, they also adopt other means of bonding. They quickly fend for themselves during the early settling-in days by organizing outings,

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barbecues and activities for the purpose of forging a group identity. The role the group performs for the individual is also apparent in the way they resist any attempt at division caused by the vagaries of the College timetable and circumstances. For instance, although they are sometimes required to attend different sessions in the College, they always sit together in the cafe. In short, they become active, enterprising and then supportive agents of their own group solidarity. Grouping serves other useful purposes for the cohort. It aids the student strategy of projecting good and bad feelings into the two socializing agencies, the training schools and the Teachers’ College. But its major essential characteristic is that it serves to bolster and support each trainee’s identity in the face of pressure to change. They use projection to confirm the identity they possess when they enter teaching, and to sustain their substantial selves. By establishing their own reference group, they use the support it provides to attack the College as a negative reference point. The College serves the purpose of a container into which they can project their fears. By their describing compulsory College attendance as: ‘It’s like serving another apprenticeship’, they mean that as adults they are unexpectedly locked into living through something which they had previously passed as youths and wished to leave behind as a ‘one-off, finished part of their lives. They hold to the view that they have ‘served their time’ once already, and would not willingly choose to repeat the process. They also use a telling analogy to pinpoint and describe their feelings by likening the College to a prison: ‘It’s like a goal, somewhere where you have to serve your time’. This feeling is captured in the repartee between a group of trainee-teachers, when one left early to attend a dental appointment: Charles: Paul: Mario:

Hey, where are you off to? I’m escaping, mate. Yeah, he got an early release for good behaviour (loud laughter).

Describing one’s actions as escaping defines the College as a place of incarceration. Splitting the School Workshop Sub-culture It is clear that the trainee-teachers feel such an acute need for personal affirmation that, when they perceive it as lacking in the College culture, they actively seek it by forming a solid supportive group. While preliminary analyses of the data indicate no evidence of the same process occurring in their schools, it became increasingly obvious as the course progressed that the same process of splitting and projection into the school did indeed emerge. This bifurcation is based on exactly the same reason behind the College split: fighting status disconfirmation within the training school settings, principally between the academics, the ‘accos’ as the tradies call them (see Gleeson, P., in progress) and themselves, the ‘tradies’. It has been argued here that while settling into the training schools the former selves are confirmed, reinforced and subtly shaped by each trainee’s interaction with his or her immediate colleagues, i.e. the other trade teachers. At the College as in their teaching locations, they form their various reference groups, wherein the other tradies universally disparage the ‘accos’. While a reference group has the power to promote the professional development of the individual within it (Khleif, 1975:301–8), in this study the experienced trade teachers at the school level, the ‘old hands’, tend to successfully impede any such professional development of the individual trainees, at least as far as the College views their personal development as teachers. For it is in this

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setting that they receive ample and enthusiastic support for their burgeoning attitudes towards academics. Discussion In seeking to transmit their industrial worldview to their pupils, trade teachers are very individualistic in their pursuit of a certain sort of teaching content as an end in itself. By grouping at the College they are able to share and defend certain taken-for-granted assumptions about the role of education and their style of teaching without fear of interruption. This obstructs the introduction and open discussion of other, competing educational values. Those in the cohort who entered teaching because of a wish to pass on their industrial work values showed no aptitude to enter into any practical competing discourse about education with other teaching colleagues. Furthermore, few of the trainees’ immediate school colleagues in the practical workshops acknowledged any commitment to educational goals other than those associated strictly with narrow vocationalism. They too spoke consistently in terms of identification with the occupational trade identity which they themselves brought to teaching. It became apparent that the main reason why the interns allowed their teaching behaviour to be shaped in a similar fashion to their immediate school colleagues was that, apart from wishing to pass the formal teaching cycle programme, there was the important need to survive socially with their teaching colleagues. Uncritical allegiance to, and acceptance of, the vocational values which formed the basis of the group’s coherence leads to further ideological isolation. The outcome, as this and other data clearly shows (Mealyea, 1988:437–500), is inward looking teachers with little in the way of divergent educational aims. There is little sense of an open debate by practical studies teachers concerning the goals of practical education; thus the highly individualistic, vocational nature of trade teaching persists. From the point of view of those interested in broad, general educational outcomes for students, and those seeking reform in the practical workshop areas, this is a disturbing finding. Sharing Uncertainty Defining their former industrial workplace as ‘clear-cut’, ‘black and white’, and the ‘real’ world, the trainee-teachers experience difficulty in adjusting to the uncertainties of teaching. They attempt to do so by drawing on the emotional resources provided by each other. This strategy of sharing and discussing problems helps them to recognize, like the student physicians in Fox’s study (1957:235– 6), that if the uncertainty is shared by fellow trainees, then they are able to meet uncertainty by at least knowing that fellow trainees are in the same predicament. Trainee-teachers, facing threat, draw enormous confidence and affirmation of the existing self from each other, resulting in a strong group allegiance. Thus, for the majority of mature-age tradespersons, the defense of their substantive former selves is more important to them than the acceptance of the credentialling authority’s educational norms and values, which, in their view, presage an unacceptable change to their self-identity.

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The Significant Other: Superficial Compliance When individuals enter an occupation, it is expected that they will be influenced by its norms and values as a result of joining a group of people already carrying out similar and familiar tasks (Corwin, 1965). Professional training programs have, as an almost universal feature, certain individuals who will influence the novice more than others. Sullivan (1940) coined the term ‘significant other’ to refer to those individuals who have a more direct influence than others over another person. These persons may be those who are appointed as ‘official’ supervisors, or, as Olesen and Whittaker (1968) observe, they can sometimes be present but not formally recognized, and are often in the guise of mentors or sponsors. The influence on trainee-teachers of ‘official’ significant others present during the practical experience part of their training course has received considerable attention (Dumas, 1969; Stones and Morris, 1972; Gibson, 1976). For instance, Dumas (1969) observed that the presence of supervising teachers for a majority of the time tends to be associated with improving self concepts by student teachers. In their study of student nurses, Olesen and Whittaker (1968) found that nurses relied on the patients as legitimators of their role performances, as well as the hospital’s official personnel such as doctors and staff nurses. Ondrack (1975:102), in reviewing practices in a number of professional schools, made the following assertion regarding the effectiveness of training programs: ‘Instead of maintaining minimum standards, an organization might do better to invest its resources in examining and improving the internal consistency of its various socialization processes’. Simpson (1967) suggests that the acceptance of a novice by a new occupational reference group may be dependent on recognition of the novice’s competence by significant others in the situation. Edgar (1973) holds that an individual develops both the ‘equipment for competence’ (the necessary skills) and a ‘competent self during the socialization process. It seems likely, then, that there is at least one competence threshold with respect to acquiring the necessary skills in the process of becoming a teacher. Two questions arise: How do trainees react when their significant others either recognize or ignore their achievements, both prior to, and during becoming teachers? What are their feelings about this process? In the privacy of research interviews, trainee-teachers proffer reasons for complying with some aspects of the College’s and their supervisor’s advice, although they are often strongly opposed to it. The main reason for trainee compliance centres around the fact that although they see the school supervisor as crucial and important, their compliance has little to do with their personal progress as professional teachers, for they consider that being fully-rounded, competent tradespersons is sufficient in itself. They grudgingly accept the supervisor’s role because of the short-term need to obtain the supervisor’s imprimatur which is necessary to pass the essential phase one part of their teaching supervision contract. As one trainee-teacher put it: ‘He’s my lifeline really, although I can’t accept some of the things he does or tells me. For example, often he’s wrong about some of the trade things he shows the kids without realizing it. But I’m not going to rock the boat, I bloody well need his signature’ (Mealyea, 1990a). For this reason the trainee-teachers superficially complied with certain techniques suggested by their teaching experience supervisors and the College staff concerning the development of lesson plans. This was reflected in the painstaking way they devised their lesson plans in the required format. Thus they gave the supervisory staff what they believed was wanted. But whilst they appeared to follow directions, below the surface a great deal of trainee hostility simmered. And

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while they went along with the school supervisor’s wishes concerning the proper conduct of classes, their compliance was often a strategy to avoid conflict. They often plotted together at the College how to do things their own way, sharing ideas and strategies that worked. What surfaced from this was a form of individualism based on resistance. Thus a common approach to their problems evolved, the evaluation and selection of strategies selected from information and advice given by each other. They sorted and sifted information on the basis of determining what would assist them in the process of status passage transition. This strategy constantly allowed them to evaluate those around them, including even each other. The interesting point is that they rarely accepted any criticism they sometimes received of what they were doing incorrectly as at all relevant to their own sense of competence in becoming teachers. Indeed, so strong is their confidence in their vocational competence that they use it to filter and sift every bit of information, selecting this or rejecting that depending on how they themselves perceive the situation regarding its impact on the former self, and its usefulness or otherwise in ‘getting through’ Teachers’ College. These three outcomes, that trainee-teachers, while negotiating a formal internship model of teacher education, place considerable emphasis on their own self-evaluation, that they have an individualistic streak, and that they commonly disparage criticism received from significant others, defies common sense. Identity, it has been argued, is constructed in interaction with others (McCall and Simmons, 1966:77–8). Thus if a person is criticized by a supervisor who is important and influential to one’s new career, then it would seem only natural that one modifies one’s behaviour into a more acceptable pattern. The findings presented here contradict this particular description of the socialization process. Clearly, the basis of trade teacher occupational identity is deeply located in the core of the industrially-formed self; thus it seems that if tradespersons are not challenged in ways which enable them to reflect on their identity, then they tend simply to evaluate and judge their new experiences in a manner that favours, supports and maintains the existing identity. Through the agency of the school workshop subculture especially, the internship model of teacher education unwittingly supports self-affirmation, thus exerting a powerful confirming effect on the trainees. The Teachers’ College failed to remould the trainee-teachers in a way that seriously challenges their occupational identity. Not once did they ever define their move from industry to teaching as entering a new career. They preferred to say they were involved in a career switch: ‘Let’s face it, in this new job we’re doing the same old things we always did at work, but this time around it’s done with kids. All right, the conditions are better than in industry, and there are different problems like [student] discipline to worry about, and a lot of the bureaucratic bullshit the school goes on with, but the actual teaching’s as easy as having a shit, and that’s not too bloody hard’. By defining what is happening as a career switch rather than a career change, no room is allowed for any challenge to affect the self. The trainee-teachers coped with impending status disconfirmation by developing both group and individual strategies. They did not make themselves students in the role desired by the credentialling authority, although one or two made half-hearted attempts in the face of stiff opposition to do so. The result is continuation of the traditional type of teaching common for years in practical workshops. The Teachers’ College thus fought and lost a battle with the trainee-teachers. Becker et al.’s (1961) study of medical students provides an instructive example of other student adaptation to the

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demands of medical school. Becker’s students had a strong commitment to a common aim— becoming doctors. As a result of the ‘impossible’ pressure of medical school, they possessed a greater commitment to learning to become students than learning how to become doctors. The intense pressure to pass examinations resulted in the students placing their aim of becoming practising doctors to one side in order to develop the short-term aim of keeping their heads above water in medical school. Becker used the term ‘time-perspectives’ to describe the medical students’ cynical short-term measures devised to cope (while at the same time preserving their long-term aim of becoming doctors after graduation). The tradespersons discussed herein, however, developed no such short/ long-term disjuncture necessary to compromise; each proudly retained their former identities as tradespersons, a self-identity also firmly tied to how they view even their occupational futures in education. For the mature-age cohort, continuity of self-identity is paramount, and in this sense, there is no status change, for there is no full status passage transition. While it is important not to overgeneralize the effects of prior socialization (Wrong, 1961:183– 93), the tradespersons in this study had a sufficiently homogeneous occupational past to make resistance to resocialization almost universal. Only two or three quickly adapted (although all shared similar reasons for entering teaching) and one reason for their particular response lies partly in the fact that they found themselves in relatively novel situations in their training schools. Such individual variations in response, attributed here to differences in training school experiences, can also emerge from their own personalities, and for the two who were immersed in traditional practical workshops, their own set of personal motives were critical. Indeed, Van Maanen and Schein (1979:254) advance similar arguments by adding to their theory of organizational socialization the qualification that outcomes such as accepting innovation in one’s role: ‘…will probably only occur when an individual who is innovative in orientation at the outset encounters an essentially benign socialization process’. For tradespersons, occupational transition is shaped largely by one’s motivational orientation. Indeed, during an address to the staff of the Teachers’ College concerning the types of tradespersons selected for teaching, a local Regional Education Director, familiar with the College and its clientele, stated: …tradespeople who come in to do teaching are the inappropriate kind of people for the new environment. They are people who have breakdowns; who cannot cope; who are resentful of change; who rely on their subject expertise for their survival, and can’t cope with a school environment which looks for something different. Trade teachers’ work is coloured by the effect of prior occupational background, and social-class position. These factors incorporate certain attitudes and values such as acceptance of racism, sexism and the general status quo. These are a result of certain societal experiences, further compounded by the architecture and ideology of isolation which, in turn, thwart the realization of the credentialling institution’s educational goals. Given that selection for trade teaching historically and currently is based more on the possession of appropriate trade credentials and trade experience than on the possession of appropriate attitudes and values necessary to secondary education, then what is needed is either a radical departure from

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who is chosen for practical teaching, or points of intervention such as those recommended by Hatton (1988:349) at pre-and in-service teacher education. Summary The findings presented here form a comprehensible pattern, namely, that occupational self-identity is fundamental to the way tradespersons view themselves. Mature-age tradespersons enter teaching with a well-defined ‘presenting culture’ (Goffman, 1986), safe and secure in their understanding and evaluation of their position in the world, which is used as the basis for interpreting their new environment. Undergoing an internship model of teacher education, trainee-teachers are immersed part of each week in a comfortable school workshop environment. This milieu provides the feeling of ‘being at home’; this is where they ‘belong’. The school work-shop sub-culture, on the whole, reinforces former occupational identity by asking the trainees to carry out tasks that reaffirm a former self. The hostile College creates only discomfort, and presents a potential threat, and thus a possible loss of control, resulting in a feeling of powerlessness. The end result can lead to the pathology evident in this study. That trainee trade teachers feel personally wounded by fears of loss of status is clear in the words of one as he exited the graduation ceremony. Encompassing the College with an expansive sweep of an arm, and at the same time giving the College the ‘finger’, he wryly stated: ‘You can all stick your books up your collective arses; I’d rather be out in the shed covered with dirt fixing something’. Any attempts to alter a mature-age tradesperson’s occupational worldview as it relates to education is risky, and will be resisted. Their former worldview is tenacious and cannot be lightly discarded; the new cannot be instantly put on. They do not offer resistance in order to change the situation towards some desired end, notwithstanding Aggleton and Whitty’s (1985:60–72) recent claims; it is a reactive way of distancing themselves from evens. Role confusion is an unconsciously motivated defense to which individuals have recourse in order to avoid the anxiety produced by disjunctions between their personalities and the demands of the roles they carry (Jaques, 1951:300). If Jaques’ picture of role confusion is correct, one would expect to find in the data strong opposing forces directed at the reforms to vocationalism, and this is what was uncovered. Tradies’ do not abandon security for the unknown, as the work of the College and the Education Ministry’ reforms to teaching seek to have them do. Both the destination and the journey getting there must appear attractive, rewarding, familiar and, consequently, manageable. Learning to become a teacher in the way the credentialling authority deemed appropriate offers them little, and so they very quickly create an ideologically reinforcing group support system (on groups as support systems, see McCall and Simmons, 1966:80,220; Goffman, 1959:81; Merton, 1949). One or two tradies did, however, begin to tinker with their views on vocationalism, but only marginally. If a trainee had as a supervisor someone outside of his or her subject area, then their assistance was more likely to contribute toward a redefinition of self. One reformer had such an experience, plus his work with local youth, to assist him. For Charles, who swam against the tide, while the seeds of disconfirmation were sown at the College, they fell on stony ground, for in the long run he was impeded in his efforts to discard narrow vocationalism in favour of teaching Technology Studies by his school workshop sub-culture.

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Undertaking teacher training, ‘tradies’ must be careful, or, like Charles the scapegoat, they become the outsiders: persons who, because of their commitments elsewhere, no longer totally belong. This presents them with a frightening prospect. Attending the Teachers’ College two days per week at least allows them some psychological respite from pressure, allowing them to view their situation critically. Teacher education presents the possibility of a strong sense of loss, obvious in the words of one trainee-teacher entertaining mild ideas of returning to industry: Bill: Sometimes I go and visit the Water Board where I used to work, but I’m really surprised at my feelings. I often leave there asking myself if I really belonged there in the first place. Difference, not distance, is the crucial factor. Leaving old occupations can confront one with the loss of a major source of self-identity. The psychological dimensions of loss, feelings of sorrow, sadness, anger, rejection, fear and ambiguity, were all felt at one stage or another by those interviewed. Indeed, the interns wrote in their personal journals of experiencing such feelings, demonstrating that it is not easy for mature-age tradespersons to face change. The Apparatus and Effect of Trade Ritual The sense of devastation both trainee and experienced trade teachers comment on when facing reforms to aspects of their work is clear when their day-to-day classroom environment is examined. Within practical workshops, objects of utilitarian value are made, various materials are worked and joined in pre-specified ways to produce a predictable artefact. On the whole, the process is conducted by masculine figures. The apparatus used in the reproduction of these artefacts invests the area with a powerful trade ritual. In many schools, although not all, the walls are festooned with trade literature and posters; everything is charged with specific significance for both teachers and students. The school workshop areas have certain features in common which amount to the trappings of powerful trade rituals, not without considerable impact and affirmation on those entering these classrooms. Surrounding pupils with trade ritual indicates to the observer that these classrooms are not only devoted to the acquisition of skills, they are also concerned with a specific ideological preparation considered appropriate for students entering the workforce. While the ethos of the practical workshop faces monumental change (Mealyea, 1991b), observations of actual classroom teaching show teachers intent upon killing off what they deem to be students’ ‘bad’ work habits, attempting to replace them with the ‘good’ habits of industry. They ‘instil’ good work habits into students considered to be tabula rasa, a problem they believe some boys, but certainly female students, have. Trade teachers argue that this particular approach is necessary due to their students being unfamiliar with the nature of practical workshops. Working within this process, the pupils are expected to be passive and willing objects in a teacher-dominated learning process. This is clear in the words of one particular teacher, thoroughly shaken by one of the major reforms to practical teaching, the introduction of a negotiated curriculum: ‘How can they tell us what projects they want to make, they’re only kids’. Trade teachers proudly celebrate their ability and competence at making and doing tasks. Fond of evoking the needs of the ‘real’ world in defense of their educational ideology, they discuss work only as it pivots around the production process. In his study Willis (1977:2) gives labour power a central place in understanding working-class people: ‘[It is their way] par excellence of articulating the

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innermost self with external reality. It is in fact the dialectic of the self to the self through the concrete world’. Once this basic compact with work has formed part of their worldview, they then tackle new processes and ideas confronting them using their ‘common sense’. The practical studies teachers’ worldview springs from subjective, rational logic about tradework. From this worldview emerges a form of cultural reproduction which contributes toward vocational reproduction in the practical classroom. In this way it can be recognized, and compared to the larger educational system, as a relative discrete entity. The controversy raging in practical workshops in secondary schools centres around two competing ideological strands. Battle lines are drawn between those who support a strong, idealistic logical belief in vocationalism, set within processes favouring reproduction, and those who support the introduction of technology studies, with its emphasis on a more general, less narrowly vocationally-oriented, negotiated pedagogy. The school workshop sub-culture supports a specific kind of affirmation of manual activity, accepting of and reinforcing the divisions of not only mental/manual work, but a split in male/ female relationships. While it is too strong to argue that the symbolic power of the apparatus of trade ritual exhibited in the practical classrooms determines behaviour (for people do not unproblematically obey such symbolism), it is nevertheless important. Such symbolism impinges on behaviour and attitude in a self reproducing way, and thus must bear some of the weight for the ideological constructions teachers place on the process of practical schooling. Clearly, the basis for, and impetus of, such beliefs are deeply rooted in an uncritical adherence to narrow vocationalism. Self-isolation from other teaching colleagues and total immersion in their culture, is part of the necessary dialectic of reproduction. References AGGLETON, P.J., and WHITTY, G. (1985) ‘Rebels without a cause? socialization and subcultural style among the children of the new middle classes’, Sociology of Education, 58, January, pp. 60–72. BECKER, H.S., GEER, B., HUGHES, E.C., and STRAUSS, A.L. (1961) Boys In White: Student Culture in Medical School, Chicago, University of Chicago Press. BECKER, H.S. (Ed.) (1971) Sociological Work, UK, Allen Lane, The Penguin Press. BREAKWELL, G. (1986) Coping with Threatened Identities, London, Methuen & Co. Ltd. BRUYN, S. (1966) The Human Perspective in Sociology: the Methodology of Participation Observation, New Jersey, Prentice-Hall, Inc. BURGESS, R. (1984) In The Field, London, George Allen & Unwin. COLLINS, P., and HUGHES, P.W. (1982) ‘Where schools are heading’, in The Australian Education Review, 16, Hawthorn, Victoria, Australian Council for Education Research. CONNELL, R.W. (1985) Teachers’ Work, Sydney, Allen and Unwin. CORWIN, R.G. (1965) ‘Professional persons in public organisations’, in Educational Administration Quarterly, 1, pp. 1–22. DALE, R. (1974) ‘Phenomenological perspectives and the sociology of the school’, in FLUDE, M., and AHIER, J., Educability, Schools and Ideology, London, Croom Helm. DONNELLY, M. (1983) Managing the Mind: A study of Medical Psychology in Early Ninteenth-Century Britain, London, Tavistock Publications. DUMAS, W. (1969) ‘Factors associated with self-concept change in student teachers’, in Journal of Educational Research, 62, 6, pp. 275–8.

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EDGAR, D.E. (Ed.) (1973) The Competent Teacher, Sydney, Angus and Robertson. Fox, R.C. (1957) ‘Training for uncertainty’, in MERTON, R. (Ed.) The Student Physician, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press. FREUD, S. (1894) ‘The neuro-psychoses of defense’, in STRACHEY, A., and TYSSON, A. (1976) The Complete Psychological Works: Standard Edition xx, 24 Vols, New York, W.W. Norton, pp. 87–172. FREUD, S. (1930) Civilization and its Discontents, London, Hogarth Press. GEERTZ, C. (1973) The Interpretation of Cultures, London, Hutchinson and Co. GIBSON, D.R. (1976) ‘The effect of school practice: the development of student perspectives’, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 2, 3, pp. 241–50. GLASER, B., and STRAUSS, A. (1967) The Discovery of Grounded Theory, Chicago, Aldine. GLEESON, D. (1981) ‘Communality and Conservatism in Technical Education: on the role of the technical teacher in further education’, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 2, 3, pp. 265–73. GLEESON, P.B. (1990) ‘Tradies’ and “Accos”: Cultural Differences in Teachers’ Work, PhD thesis, La Trobe University, Bundoora, Victoria. GOFFMAN, E. (1959) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, New York, Garden City, Doubleday. GOFFMAN, E. (1968) Asylums, UK, Penguin. GOODMAN, J. (1985) ‘Field based experience: a study of social control and student teachers’ response to institutional constraints’, Journal of Education for Teaching, 11, 1, pp. 26– 49. HARGREAVES, A. (1977) ‘Progressivism and pupil autonomy’, Sociology Review, August. HARGREAVES, A. (1978) ‘The significance of classroom coping strategies’, in BARTON, L., and MEIGHAN, R., Sociological interpretations of Schooling and Classrooms: A Reappraisal, UK, Nafferton Books, pp. 73– 100. HARGREAVES, A. (1979) ‘Strategies, decisions and control: Interaction in a middle school classroom’, in EGGLESTON, J. (Ed.) Teacher Decision-Making in the Classroom, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul. HARGREAVES, A. (1984) ‘Experience counts, theory doesn’t: how teachers talk about their work’, Sociology of Education, 57, pp. 224–54. HATTON, E.J. (1988) ‘Teachers’ work as bricolage: implications for teacher education’,0 British Journal of Sociology of Education, 9, 3, pp. 337–57. HOLT, M, and REID, W.A. (1988) ‘Instrumentalism and education: 14–18 rhetoric and the 11–16 curriculum’, in POLLARD, A., PURVIS, J., and WALFORD, G., Education, Training and the New Vocationalism: experience and policy, Open University Press Milton Keynes, pp. 15–31. HOWARD, J. (1792) The State of Prisons in England and Wales, UK, Warrington. HUGHES, P. (1987) The Curriculum and Work: An Overview of the Australian Experience, Woden, Canberra, Australia, Curriculum Development Centre. JACQUES, E. (1951) The changing culture of a factory, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul. JACQUES, E. (1955) ‘Social system as a defense against persecutory and depressive anxiety’, in KLEIN, M., HERMANN, P., and MONEY-KYRLE, R.E. (Eds) New Directions in Psychoanalysis: The Significance of Infant Conflict in the Pattern of Adult Behaviour, New York, Basic Books, pp. 478–98. JAHODA, M. (1979) ‘The impact of unemployment in the 1930s and the 1970s’, Bulletin of The British Psychological Society, 32, pp. 309–14. JAHODA, M. (1982) Employment and Unemployment, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. KEMMIS, S., COLE, P., and SUGGETT, D. (1983) Orientations to Curriculum and Transition: Towards The Socially-Critical School, Melbourne, Victorian Institute of Secondary Education. KHLEIF, B. (1975) ‘Professionalization of school superintendents: a sociocultural study of an elite program’, Human Organisation, 34, 3, pp. 301–8. KLEIN, M. (1932) The Psychoanalysis of Children, New York, Delta Books. KLEIN, M. (1955) ‘On identification’, in New Directions in Psychoanalysis: The Significance of Infant Conflict in the Pattern of Adult Behaviour, New York, Basic Books. KLEIN, M., and RIVIERE, J. (1964) Love, Hate and Reparation, New York, Pantheon.

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LACEY, C. (1977) The Socialization of Teachers, London, Methuen and Co. Ltd. McCALL, G.J., and SIMMONS, J.L. (1966) Identities and Interaction, New York, The Free Press. MARTIN, P.Y., and TURNER, B.A. (1986) ‘Grounded theory and organizational research’, The Journal of Behavioural Science, 22, 2, pp. 141–57. MEAD, G.H. (1934) Mind, Self and Society, Chicago, University of Chicago Press. MEALYEA, R. (1985) ‘Working class students and the TAFE curriculum’, Victorian TAFE Papers, 3, October, pp. 27–36. MEALYEA, R. (1988) Confirmed Tradies: A study of a Mature-Age Teacher Education Programme, unpublished PhD thesis, Education Faculty, Monash University, Victoria, Australia. MEALYEA, R. (1989a) ‘Humour as a coping mechanism in the transition from tradesperson to teacher’, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 10, 3, pp. 311–33. MEALYEA, R. (1989b) Sloyd, Vocationalism and Technology Studies: Practical Studies in Secondary Schooling, Victoria, Hawthorn Institute of Education, 442 Auburn Rd, Hawthorn, 3122. MEALYEA, R. (1990a, 1992) ‘Not So “Significant Others”: Problems with the field-based classroom supervision of mature-age, technical trainee teachers’, Australian Journal of Education, 36, 2, pp. 179–99. MEALYEA, R. (1990b) ‘Teaching Vocationalism in Secondary Technical Schools in Victoria, Australia: The winds of change’, Journal of Industrial Teacher Education, 27, 4 (Summer), pp. 6–20. MERTON, R. (1949) Social Theory and Social Structure, Glencoe, 111., Free Press. MINISTRY OF EDUCATION (1985) Ministerial Papers Nos 1–6, Victoria. OLESEN, V.L., and WHITTAKER, E.W. (1968) The Silent Dialogue, USA, San Francisco, Jossey Bass Inc. ONDRACK, D.A. (1975) ‘Socialization in professional schools: a comparative study’, Administrative Science Quarterly, 20, 1, pp. 97–103. POLLARD, A. (1982) ‘A model of classroom coping strategies’, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 1 (March), pp. 19–37. SHERIF, C, and SHERIF, M. (Eds) (1967) Attitudes, Ego-Involvement and Change, New York, Wiley. SIKES, P.J., MEASOR, L., and WOODS, P. (Eds) (1985) Teacher Careers—Crises and Continuities, London, The Falmer Press. SIMPSON, I.H. (1967) ‘Patterns of socialisation into professions: the case of student nurses’, Sociological Inquiry, 37, pp. 47–54. STONES, E., and MORRIS, S. (1972) Teaching Practice: Problems and Perspectives, London, Metheun. SULLIVAN, H.S. (1940) Conceptions of Modern Psychiatry, Washington, DC, W.A. White Psychiatric Foundation. TANGUY, L. (1985) ‘Academic studies and technical education: new dimensions of an old struggle in the division of knowledge’, Sociology of Education, 58 (January), pp. 20–33. TERKEL, S. (1974) Working, UK, The Chaucer Press Ltd. THOMAS, W.I. (1928) The Child in America, New York, Knopf. TURNER, B. (1981) ‘Some practical aspects of qualitative data analysis: one way of organizing the cognitive processes associated with the generation of grounded theory’, Quality and Quantity, 15, pp. 225–47. VAN MAANEN, J., and SCHEIN, E.H. (1979) ‘Toward a theory of organisational socialisation’, in STAW, B.M. (1979) Research in Organisational Behaviour. I,Greenwich, CT, JAI Press, p. 254. VlCTORIAN BUILDING AND CONSTRUCTION INDUSTRY AND TRAINING BOARD (1990) Report into TAFE building and construction studies teachers, Victoria, State Training Board. WARR, P. (1984) ‘Job loss, unemployment and psychological well-being’, in ALLEn, V., and VAN DE VLIERT, M. (Eds) Role Transitions, New York, Plenum. WELLS, L. (1980) ‘The group-as-a-whole: a systemic socio-analytic perspective on interpersonal and group relations’, in ALDERFER, C.P., and COORER, C.L. (Eds) Advances in Experiential Social Processes, Volume 2, Chichester, John Wiley & Sons Ltd, pp. 165– 99. WILLIS, P. (1977) Learning to Labour, Farnsborough, Saxon House. WOODS, P. (1979) The Divided School, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul.

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List of Contributors

Lawrence Angus is a senior lecturer in education in the School of Graduate Studies, Monash University, where he teaches educational policy and administration. His major theoretical interest is in critical analysis of the relationship of educational institutions to their social and cultural context. He is the author of Continuity and Change in Catholic Education: An Ethnography of a Christian Brothers College in Australian Society (Falmer Press) and of numerous monographs and articles on educational issues. Bob Connell is Professor of Sociology at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Among his significant publications in the areas of education, social class and gender are Making the Difference (with Dean Ashenden, Sandra Kessler and Gary Dowset), Teachers’ Work and Gender and Power. He is currently working on questions about masculinity, poverty and education, and issues of sexuality and social theory. Ken Johnston is Head of the Sociology Discipline at Macquarie University in New South Wales. He teaches sociology of education and his current research interests centre around education and social justice, ideological conflicts and education, and the sociology of knowledge. Robert Mealyea lectures at the Hawthorn Institute of Education. His teaching and research interests include psycholinguistics, mid-life career transition, technology and work, and qualitative methodologies. He is currently researching the phenomenon of mass public shootings. Mary O’Dowd is a research student at Monash University, Melbourne. Her areas of major academic interest include social justice issues and deep ecology as a perspective on ‘development’. James Walker is Professor and Dean of Education, and Director of the Centre for Research in Professional Education, at the University of Canberra. He has written widely on youth culture and schooling, curriculum theory, research methodology, educational policy and educational administration. His book, Louts and Legends: Male Youth Culture in an Inner City School, was published by Allen and Unwin. Viv White has been a primary school teacher-librarian and an activist in the Disadvantaged Schools Program. She was a policy worker and field officer in the Program, and worked at Macquarie University, with Ken Johnston and Bob Connell, on the Poverty, Education and the DSP Project. She is currently New South Wales coordinator of the National Schools Project. Bruce Wilson is Director of URCOT (Union Research Centre on Organization and Technology). He has worked extensively on issues of teacher education and has undertaken a wide variety of research activities related to school-work transition, structural change in Australian education,

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social division and educational outcomes, and school-community relations. Amongst his many publications he is joint author with Johanna Wyn of Shaping Futures. Johanna Wyn is Director of the Youth Research Centre at the University of Melbourne. She is currently involved in research which explores ways of broadening the curriculum in the interests of young women. She also teaches sociology and women’s studies at the Institute of Education, University of Melbourne and her interests include gender, methodology, youth and the labour market.

Index

academic curriculum role in masculinity construction, 100 competitive, 3, 13 Acker, J, 85, 86 Adams, D., 101 Adkinson, J., 81, 87 agency, 34, 62, 101, 138, 142 and structure, 55, 58, 62, 86, 138 Aggleton, P.J., 188, 190 Ahier, J., 160, 190 Aldrich, H., 61, 87 Allen, S., 126 alternative lifestyle, 23, 33, 48 Anderson, G., 55, 87 Angus, L., 55–89 Angyal, Andras, 44 Anthony, E. et al, 44, 45, 52 Apple, M, 58, 83, 87 Arnold, Dr, 90 Arnot, M., 68, 87 Ashenden, D., 4, 19 Askew, S., 68, 82, 87 ‘at risk’, the see also ‘young people at risk’, 19–21, 28, 45 as ‘other’, 34, 40, 44 construction of, 45, 46 deconstruction of, 51 disempowerment of, 51–52 empowerment of, 30, 48 Australian Schools Commission, 18, 90, 101, 109, 110, 120, 125, 126 Interim Committee of, 110, 123, 126 Ball, S., 21, 52, 136, 158 Barnett, M., 61, 87 Bates, R., 55, 60, 61, 87 Becker, H., 21, 22, 53, 159, 177, 190

Becker, M.S. et al, 186, 190 Benson, J., 61, 62, 87 Berger, P., 33, 53 Bernstein, B., 137, 138, 139, 140, 158 Black, P., 22, 24, 54 Blackmore, J., 57, 87 Blair, R., 68, 87 Bourdieu, P., 30, 36, 53, 105, 126 Bowles, G., 28, 53 Breakwell, G., 176, 190 Bruyn, S., 159, 190 Buber, M., 36, 50, 53 Bulmer, M., 124, 126 Burdekin, B, 24, 53 Burgess, R., 159, 190 Burrell, G., 61, 87 Cain, S., 50, 53 Capra, F, 32, 53 Carpenter, P., 58, 87 Carrigan, T. et al, 90, 101 case study, 16–17 Cassidy, G., 103, 126 Catholicism, 55 and chastity and celibacy, 68 as social and political phenomenon, 57 traditions of, 63, 67 Christian Brothers, 55–89 class, gender and ethnic relations, 10, 12, 15, 16, 18 class relations, 4, 16 see also class and gender relations class and gender as structuring process, 4 division, 12, 14 relations, 1, 5, 6, 7, 16 Clegg, S., 61, 62, 87 Cock, P., 22, 24, 54 197

198

INDEX

Cohen, A., 67, 87 Collins, P., 161, 190 Commonwealth Schools Commission see Australian Schools Commission Commonwealth Employment Service, 151, 153, 154 compensatory education, 18, 108, 114–115 competition and character building, 65 as a problem-solving procedure, 135 as essential to academic success, 65 for jobs, 14, 181 in classrooms, 147 masculine tradition of, 83 Connell, R.W. et al, 16, 18, 19 Connell, Robert, 1, 2, 4, 58, 59, 60, 61, 87, 90–102, 126, 174, 190 Corwin, R.G., 184, 190 counter-sexist education, 99–101 counter-sexist politics men involved in, 97–98 credentialism, 145, 149, 151 as ‘good results’, 145–149 cultural capital, 30, 36 cultural conflict, 1, 4, 7, 10–12, 16–17, 18 cultural conservatism, 142, 157 cultural convergence, 3, 135 cultural dispositions, 128–129 cultural divergence between teachers and students, 113, 129, 130, 134, 135, 139, 145, 145, 148, 156, 157 cultural formation, 5, 13, 15 cultural groups (viz: ‘the Asians’, ‘the footballers’, ‘the Greeks’, ‘the handballers’, ‘the three friends’) 128– 158 cultural identity, 1 construction of, 3 cultural production and contestation, 55 and processes of cultural transmission, 138 cultural reproduction and vocational reproduction, 158–190 culture, 129 as sets of dispositions, 137 at school, 128–130 Dale, R., 160, 190 Daly, Mary, 98 de Beauvoir, S., 19, 34–36, 44, 53, 59, 87, 98 Deal, T., 60, 61, 87

Dean, J. et al, 53 deconstruction, 1, 19, 34, 52 as critical appraisal, 44 as political, 46, 47 of text and author, 31 deep ecology, 32–33, 50 Derrida, J., 35, 53 ‘difference’, 15–16, 81 disadvantage understanding of, 110–115, 117 Disadvantaged Schools Program, 2, 92, 103–125 discipline, 1, 57, 86, 136, 141, 150, 166, 168, 170, 174, 186 and authority, 68–77 and corporal punishment, 69, 73, 77 and gender regime, 71–77 and male culture, 73–75, 83, 93 Donaldson, L., 61, 88 Donnelly, M., 180, 190 Douglas, A. et al, 106, 126 Dowsett, Gary, 4 ‘dropped outs’, 24, 26, 27, 28, 36, 38, 43 drug taking, 39–44, 49 drug use systems perspective on, 39–43, 49 Duelli-Klein, R., 28, 53 Dumas, W., 185, 190 Duncan, G., 45 Dunkerley, D., 61, 62, 87 Dwyer P.J. et al, 16, 19 Edgar, D.E., 185, 190 educational outcomes, 3, 4 of children from different backgrounds, 18 educational activity as combination of reflection and practice, 105– 106 educational research and policy development, 124–125 educational policy, 2, 3, 12 educational inequality, v, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 18 and social inequality, 116 and transformation of practice, 107–124, 124 deficit notions of, 113, 174 Eisenstein, H., 61, 88 Elias, N., 107, 126 employment, 9, 19 empowerment, 1, 29, 40, 41, 50, 55, 115, 121 and love, 49–51

INDEX

and research methodology, 28 of parents, 122 of the ‘at risk’, 19, 28, 46 of working-class students, 112, 114 environmental politics, 2, 92 ethnography and organisational analysis, 1, 16–17, 21 and participant observation, 21 and policy-oriented studies, 124 critical 1, 55 in education, 106 methodology, 159 tradition of, 32 family abuse and rejection of, 7, 49 commitment to education, 10 Farganis, S., 59, 88 Farrell, W., 99, 102 Felski, R., 85, 88 female subordination, 58 female solidarity, 82 female epistemology, 59 femininity construction of, 58 subordinated, 58, 60 types of, 91 feminism, 2, 136 and epistemology, 59, 85 and exploration of natural science, 97 public face of, 98 reading of, 97–99 ‘second wave’ of, 98 feminist theory, 19, 31, 32, 47 feminist theorists, 34, 85 Ferguson, K., 59, 84, 88 Finch, J., 124, 125, 127 Fisher, F., 45, 53 Fitzgerald, R.T., 107, 127 Flax, J., 19, 32, 53 Flude, M., 160, 190 Fox Keller, E., 35, 53 Fox R.C., 184, 190 Freire, P., 51, 53 Freud, S., 168, 190 Friedan, Betty, 98 Friedrich, P., 47, 53 Fromm, E., 50, 51, 53

199

Gadamer, H., 47 Geertz, C, 160, 190 gender expectations, 9, 11, 60 gender regime, 1, 55, 57, 59, 62, 77, 81, 82, 83 women’s confrontation with, 85–86 gender order, 58, 59, 60 gender subjectivity, 1, 57, 63, 72 gender code, 58, 82 gender relations, 1, 4, 11, 58, 59, 68, 79, 100, 121 see also class and gender relations gender, 1, 2, 11, 57, 100, 171 and organizational culture, 60–63, 90 construction of, 90–91 social construction of, 1, 16, 57, 58, 68, 90–91 theories of, 90, 129 gender inequality, 1, 2, 55, 57 gender difference, 16, 145 Gibson, D.R., 185, 190 Giddens, A., 34, 53, 62, 88, 138, 158 Gilligan, C, 60 61, 85, 88 Giroux H., 62, 88, 138, 158 Glaser, B.G., 21, 53, 159, 160, 190 Gleeson, P.B., 183, 191 Gleeson, D., 174, 178, 191 Goffman, E., 159, 180, 187, 188, 191 Goldberg, H., 99, 102 ‘good teaching’, 134–137, 142, 143 good teacher, 140, 143–144 Goodman, J., 159, 191 Griffin, C, 14, 19 Griffin, S., 85, 88 group conflict, 26–27 group identity, 181–183, 184 group cohesion, 25–26, 27, 188 group solidarity, 42, 177 see also group cohesion Habermas, J., 34 Harding, S., 35, 53, 97, 102 Hargreaves, D.H., 94, 102, 135, 158, 170, 176, 191 Harman, D., 98, 102 Harstock, N., 59, 88 Hatton, E.J., 174, 187, 191 Hearn, J., 60, 88 hegemonic school practices, 58, 82 hegemonic culture, 55, 62 hegemonic masculinity, 32, 35, 74, 82 hegemony, 36–37, 38, 44 Heward, C, 91, 102

200

INDEX

Higher School Certificate, 95, 128, 145, 145, 146, 147 Holt, M, 161, 191 Howard, J., 180, 191 Hughes, P., 161, 162, 180, 191 humour as a coping mechanism, 176–177 significance of, 177–178, 182 Hunt, Christine, 128, 158 Hunter, C St J, 98, 102 Hyde, C, 61, 85, 88 identity and work, 177–178 construction of, v, 3, 186 difference as part of, 16 of tradespeople, 167 psychological, 49 shared, 26 sub-group, 25 women’s, 86 inner-city boys’ high school, 128–158 inner-city schools problems of, 110–111 resources crisis in, 107–108 interconnectedness, 49–51 intercultural articulation between cultural groups, 129 between student and teacher cultures, 3, 129–157 changes in, 138 theory of, 128–129, 142 Index of Disadvantage, 109, 124, 125 Inner City Education Alliance, 110–111 Ives, R., 58, 88 Jacques, E., 182, 188, 191 Jahoda, M., 178, 191 Johnson, L., 97, 102 Johnston, Ken, 2, 92, 103–127 Karmel, Peter, 110 Karmel Report, 111, 126 see also Australian Schools Commission, Interim Committee of Keely, A., 126 Keeves, J.P., 110, 127 Keller, E., 59, 88, 97, 102 Kelly, A., 58, 88 Kemmis, S., 21, 52

Kemmis, S. et al, 161, 163, 191 Kennedy, A., 60, 61, 87 Kenny, A. et al, 52, 53 Kessler, S. et al, 59, 88, 91, 94, 102 Kessler, Sandra, 4 Khleif, B., 183, 191 Klein M., 182, 191 Kohler Reissman, C, 35, 47, 53 labour market, 14, 95, 137, 147, 151, 153, 154 Lacey, C, 136, 137, 158, 176, 191 Laeuchli, S., 66, 68, 88 Lafitte, P, 97, 102 Lather, P., 28, 53 Lawn, M., 105, 127 Leach, E., 107, 127 learning, 14, 141–142, 144, 169 Leder, G., 58, 88 Lee, J., 90, 101 life-history, 1, 2, 37, 91, 101, 106, 107, 124 as different from ethnography, 92 in policy-oriented research, 103, 105–107, 124– 125 Liffman, M, 45, 53 Lilienfeld, R., 32, 53 livelihood, v, 1, 5, 11, 13, 18, 44 student perspectives on, 12–14 living skills, 139, 144, 151 Madge, N., 45, 54 male guilt, 98–99, 101 male networks and patronage, 65, 81 Malone, M., 68, 85, 88 Manion, Brother Cas, 64, 88 Marshall, J., 84, 88 Martin, P.Y., 160, 191 Mascia-Lees, F. et al, 32, 34, 47, 53 masculinities and school curriculum, 94 demarcation of, 94 differentiation of, 2 subordinated, 59 masculinity and bureaucratic domination, 84 and football, 63, 68 and violence, 73–77 social construction of, 1, 2, 55, 58, 86, 91, 96, 100

INDEX

versions of, 2, 57, 59, 63, 64, 65, 67, 91, 94–95, 97, 101 Matthews, F, 49, 52, 53 Matthews, J., 58, 88 Maturana, H., 33, 50, 53 McCall, G.J., 186, 188, 191 McDonald, M., 58, 88 McGregor, D., 72, 88 McLaren, P., 85, 88 Mead, G.H., 191 Mealyea, Robert, 3, 158–192 Meek, V.L., 61, 88 men and cooperative work with feminists, 101 and counter-sexist politics, 97–98 Merton, R., 188, 192 Messner, M., 91, 99, 102 Metcalfe, W.J., 24, 53 Meyeroff, M., 44, 53 Miller, S.M., 21, 54 Mills, A., 60, 61, 88 Ministry of Education (Victoria), 178, 192 Moi, T., 85, 88 Morgan, G., 61, 87 Morris, S., 185, 192 Morris, J., 68, 89

Ozga, J., 105, 127

Naess, A., 33, 50, 54 ‘new middle class’, 137, 145 New South Wales Department of Education, 113, 127, 158 Nichol, A.R., 44, 45, 54

racism, 167, 177 Radic, L., 68, 89 re-visioning of research, 1, 32 reality, construction of, 39, 48 reflexivity, 17, 31–46, 47, 85 Reid, W.A. 161, 191 Reinhartz, S., 28, 54 relevance, 130, 149, 150–152 research and policy, 125 resistance, 3 and acquiescence, 177 of trainee-teachers, 182, 185 resources, cultural, 83, 137, 149 Rich, A., 34, 54, 85, 89, 96, 102 Rigby, A., 22, 23, 54 Riley, P., 61, 89 Rist, R., 21, 54, 124, 127 Rittel, H., 19, 31, 54 Riviere, J., 182, 191 Robert, E.R., 97, 102 Roper, T., 107, 127

O’Dowd, Mary, 1, 19–55 occupational re-socialization, 167–168 occupational self-identity, 158, 159, 164, 167, 176– 177 Olesen, V.L., 184, 185, 192 Ondrack, D.A., 185, 192 ‘opt outs’, 24, 26, 27, 29, 30, 38, 43 oral history see life history organizational structures, 62, 77, 123, 177 organizational culture, 1, 62, 77, 86 and maleness, 82 gender dynamics in, 57, 85 ‘other’, the, 34–39, 50 ‘otherness’, 19, 34, 35, 42 Ouchi, W., 60, 61, 89

201

Parkin, W., 60, 88 Parsons, T., 32 Passeron, J., 30, 36, 53 patriarchal thinking, 34–36, 73 patriarchy, 32, 34, 47, 52, 83, 84–86, 93 pedagogy, 3, 16, 139, 140, 145, 161, 162, 171, 179 see also teacher-student relationship ‘place’, sense of, 48–49, 51 Pollard, A., 124, 127, 145, 158, 176, 192 post-postivist philosophy, 31, 47 post-positivist perspective, 19, 32–34 poverty line, 45, 49 poverty, 45–46, 103, 110, 119–120 power, 15, 32, 38, 47, 51, 81, 97, 115, 120, 121, 123, 135 relations of, 14, 47, 58, 85, 94, 160 practical subjects reforms to, 162–163, 172, 178–179 Ptacek, J., 101, 102 pupils see students qualitative research, 5, 6, 18, 124 Quine, V.W., 142, 158

202

INDEX

Rorty, R., 47, 54 Ross, C, 68, 82, 87 Ruby, A. et al, 103, 127 rules, 1, 60, 62, 82, 105, 139 Rutter, M, 45, 54 Sampson, S., 58, 89 Sarah, E., 58, 89 Schein, E.M., 187, 192 school and the labour market, 11 and work, 137, 150–157, 176 as agency of ‘sex role’ socialization, 99 as a social structure, 3, 129, 157 coping with, 148–149 cost of, 9–11 increasing retention rates in, 6, 12 relative autonomy of, 137–138, 157 student perspectives on, 12, 14–15 school architecture, 160, 177, 178–183 school culture, 79, 82, 83, 139 school resources, 108–109 school decision making exclusion of parents from, 121–122 School Certificate, 128, 147, 148, 149, 158 schools as cultural sites, 62 as social institutions, 3, 105–106 schoolwork, 129, 130, 137–145 Schwartz, G., 21, 54 Schwartz, M., 21, 54 Schwendinger, H., 31, 45, 54 Schwendinger, J., 31, 45, 54 Scotson, J., 107, 126 Scott, J., 84, 89 Segal, L., 98, 102 ‘sex role’, 90, 91 sexism, 82, 99, 141, 167, 168, 177, 178 sexual division of labour in higher education, 99 in teaching, 58, 83 sexual harassment, 10, 11, 60, 75–77, 82–83 sexual politics courses on, 99–101 sexuality, 93, 100, 141 gay, 101 information about, 2, 101 Shakeshaft, G., 58, 89 Silverman, D., 17, 19, 89

Simmel, G., 26, 54 Simmons, J.L., 186, 188, 191 Simpson, I.H., 185, 192 Slavin, R. et al, 19, 54 Smircich, L., 60, 61, 62, 89 social class and religion, 57 as set of concrete relations, 129 construction of, 1, 55 interaction with gender, 4 of teachers, 130 social division, v, 1, 3, 4, 5, 7, 10–12, 13, 14, 15–16, 18 social analysis, 34, 91 social psychology, 91–92 social structure, 1, 35, 59, 62, 137–138 and cultural dynamics, 129 created by intercultural articulations, 129 in curriculum and pedagogy, 144 social justice, 85, 110, 116 socialization, 3, 25, 29, 30, 31, 151, 160, 182, 185, 186–187 society, ‘at risk’, 45–46, 50, 51 Spender, D., 58, 65, 89 Stanley, L., 28, 54 Stones, E., 185, 192 Strauss, A.L. 21, 53, 159, 160, 190 student culture, 112, 151 distinct from staff culture, 105–106 student-teacher interaction see teacher-student interaction students and ‘colonization’, 148–149 stratification and differentiation of, 138–141 subject communities curriculum experienced through, 150 in school staffrooms, 135–137 Sullivan, M.S., 184, 192 Sumner, A., 67, 89 Sweet, Richard, 6, 19 Swingewood, A., 61, 89 systems analysis, 38, 45 systems theory, 19, 32–34, 43–44 second generation, 31, 32 Tanguy, L., 160, 192 teacher culture, 134, 135, 137, 140, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 149, 156 teacher education, 158

INDEX

internship model of, 160–190 teacher perspectives on student needs and potential, 152–157 teacher roles, 138, 139, 145, 173 teacher-student relationship, 74, 83, 111, 134, 136, 139, 140, 145, 168, 179–180 see also pedagogy teachers and culture shock, 130–137 competence of, 134, 137, 185–186, 189 credibility problem of, 156–157 cultural construction of, 2 division between academic and trade, 170, 178 social class of, 3, 131 social relations among, 179–180 with middle-class backgrounds, 130–132 with working-class backgrounds, 132–134 teachers’ work, 160, 180 gender in construction of, 58 technology studies, 158–190 Technology Studies teachers, 158–190 Terkel, S., 165, 192 Thomas, W.I., 159, 192 Thompson, C, 90, 102 Thompson, P., 106, 127 Thorne, B., 91, 102 Tolson, A., 101, 102 trade teaching reform of, 158–159 trade teachers see Technology Studies teachers ‘tradies’ see Technology Studies teachers Tronto, J., 35, 54 truancy, 145, 148 Turner, B., 160, 191, 192 underclass, 31, 32 background of, 29 of long-term unemployed, 30 membership of, 28 unemployment and workforce restructuring, 156, 181 as a ‘myth’, 153 effects of, 178 employer response to, 180–181 Van Maanen, J., 187, 192 Varela, F., 33, 50, 53

203

Victorian Building and Construction Industry Training Board, 181, 192 Vidich, A., 21, 54 Virgin Mary, 57, 66, 68, 85 vocational education, 151, 152, 154–157 vocationalism, 3, 159, 160–163 erosion of, 172–178 Von Bertalanffy, L., 33, 54 Von Foerster, M., 32 Wakeford, J.C., 148, 158 Walby, S., 74, 89 Walker, James, 2, 3, 65, 89, 94, 102, 128–158 Walsh, K. et al, 83, 89 Warr, P., 177, 192 Webb, F.J. et al, 54 Wehlage, G. et al, 48, 54 Weiber, K., 106, 127 Wells, L., 177, 192 Werner, E., 29, 44, 45, 54 Wescott, M., 86, 89 White, Viv, 2, 92, 103–127 Whittaker, E.W., 184, 185, 192 Whitty, G., 188, 190 Whyte, J., 58, 89 Whyte, W.F., 54 Wickham, G., 47, 54 Wilber, K., 55 Williams, P.N., 18, 19, 110, 126, 127 Willis, P., 62, 89, 94, 102, 189, 192 Wilson, Bruce, v, 4–19, 126 Winter, M.F., 97, 102 Wise, S., 28, 54 Wittgenstein, L., 33, 34, 36, 55 womanhood, 16, 60, 67 women and person-oriented values, 84 as agents of social and cultural change, 85–86 disempowerment of, 85 marginalization of, 60, 85 traditional role of, 84 Woods, P., 129, 145, 148, 149, 158, 159, 176, 192, 192 Woolgar, S., 31, 55 work as ‘real world’, 161, 166, 177, 184 as source of personal worth, 166 student perspectives on, 144 working-class

204

INDEX

and labour power, 189 communities, 105 curriculum, 114–115 cultural perspectives, 12 culture, 114 expectations of schooling, 14 Irish-Australian Catholics in, 65 romanticising of, 113–114 workshop sub-culture, 160, 161, 172–176, 178, 183, 186, 188, 190 Wrong, K.M., 187, 192 Wyn, Johanna, v, 4–19 126 Yates, L., 58, 89, 100, 102 young people and escape from at risk background and orientation to the future and the labour market, 12 and transition to adulthood, 13 ‘at risk’, 1, 19–55 ‘dropped out’ of school, 21 empowerment of, 31 experience of education of, 4 orientation to schooling of, 5 out of home, 22, 24, 25, 30, 52 Young, S., 126 youth labour market, 5 and structural unemployment, 91 collapse of, 13 youth culture, 3, 129, 139 articulation with teacher culture, 138 as student cultures, 136, 145 interaction between class, gender and ethnicity in, 145 youth unemployment, 6, 12, 162