A Good Enough School

A Good Enough School I Report n:o 164 A GOOD ENOUGH SCHOOL A study of life at school, and school’s role in life Final report from the project “Students as Partners in Research” National Agency for Education 1 A Good Enough School I Order adress: Liber Distribution Publication Services S-162 89 Stockholm Sweden Tel +46(0)8-690 95 76 Fax +46(0)8-690 95 50 E-mail: [email protected] Order number: 00:524 Dnr: 1995:1502 ISSN 1102-2421 ISRN SKOLV-R- -164- -SE Published by Skolverket (National Agency for Education) Sweden 2000 Printed by db grafiska, Örebro 2 A Good Enough School I Swedish National Agency for EducationForeword This report brings together the findings from an evaluation study based on three years of correspondence between the Swedish National Agency for Education and forty-six students from different schools around Sweden. The study had a twofold objective: to contribute to methodological development; and to capture the way students view school. The study began in 1995 and continued until 1998. The first section of the report presents an account of how the idea to base a study on an exchange of letters arose, and describes the initial phase of the project. We look at the concept of “students as partners in research”, and consider various aspects of the role of writing in the reflective process. There is also a description of the practical organisation of the correspondence. The following section gives a brief account of the methodology adopted in processing and analysing the students’ letters. There is a short review of the three interim reports which were published while the study was in progress, and a description of the phenomenographical analysis of the textual material. In the next section we present the overall analysis of the whole of the letter-based material, and describe how we widened our methodological perspective to an angle which can perhaps most accurately be termed “cultural analysis”. The analytical work leading to the final overall findings and conclusions, which has followed a course leading from the general to the particular and back to the general, is described in such a way that the reader can follow the analytical process. The second part of the report presents the research results gained from the analysis, in two sections which take a qualitative look at the project’s findings. The report concludes with a discussion of the findings and the methodological approach adopted. This book addresses itself to teachers, school managers and others who work in the field of school education. It may also be of interest in the area of teacher training, and other training and education contexts relating to children and young people. It is our hope that the report will arouse the reader’s interest, invite a critical examination of its findings, and represent a contribution to wider discussion of life at school and the place occupied by school in young peoples’ lives. A “Research Report”, which looks at the “Students as Partners in Research” project in greater academic detail and provides a more scientific examination of the methodological considerations relating to the study, is available on order from the National Agency for Education (in Swedish only). We wish to extend a warm “Thank you” to the forty-six school students whose commitment and readiness to approach the task seriously and openly made this report possible. Stockholm, March 1999 Christian Lundahl Oscar Öquist Ulf P. Lundgren Oscar Öquist Director of Education Director General Project Leaders Head of Department of Evaluation Christian Lundahl Director of Education 3 A Good Enough School I 4 A Good Enough School I Contents Part One Students as Partners in Research 7 To Write is to Think 13 The Letter as a Genre 15 Our Themes 16 The Correspondence 18 526 Letters 20 Processing and Analysing the Letters 21 Powerlessness – Strangeness – Helps and Hindrances 21 From the General to the Particular 23 … and Back to the General 24 Part Two Findings 27 The “School World” 28 The Hall of Mirrors 28 “I’m a white nigga” Dressed for Success Soap Opera: “Life at School” Rites of Passage at School A Question of Ethics and Aesthetics Fragmentation 41 Non-Coherence of Time and Place Nurds and Troublemakers Too big for this Town The Multicultural Park Lighting 50 Präzens Light and Shade “A Good Enough Teacher” Drug Trade 59 Highs and Lows Decimal Fetichism Trial by Ordeal 5 A Good Enough School I The Strategists 69 The Art of Surviving a Day at School Sussing out the System Evasive Action Surrogate Strategies Individual Sovereignty Part Three A Good Enough School 84 Overall Reflections on the Study 94 Bibliography 97 6 A Good Enough School I PART 1 Students as Partners in Research When we wish to find out what students’ attitudes towards school are, the usual approach is to carry out different kinds of questionnaire-based studies. In 1992, when the National Agency for Education carried out a national evaluation of school education at the compulsory level (i.e. for pupils aged from seven to sixteen) in an investigation called the “NU 92” project1 , the objective was to achieve a more multifaceted and nuanced picture of the work of the country’s schools. To this aim a series of different questionnaire-based studies were carried out; what all these studies had in common was that they took as their point of departure the definitions which the national curriculum and schools themselves give of what the work of schools is and should be. The project met with a good deal of criticism; one source of criticism was the Department of Education at the University of Uppsala and the research team led by Professor Sverker Lindblad. Lindblad, and others, put forward the objection that the project was lacking any clear student perspective regarding the work done by schools: “One consequence of this (the fact that the project had as its basis the definitions of the work of schools embodied in the national curriculum) is that no attention has been paid to the wide-ranging and varied activity which takes place in school even though it is not embraced by the official descriptions of school life contained in the national curriculum; activity which nonetheless has an important part to play in school students’ development – for example everything that goes on in the school yard and in the corridors, inter-student interaction in the classroom, etc. Another consequence is that the students included in the study were asked to respond to ready-constructed tasks similar to those ordinarily set by teachers, and were not given the opportunity to use their own definitions and premises to illuminate what they themselves see as the central experiences of their life at school.” (From Praxis No. 1, 1995, p 12). When researchers such as Lindblad talk of the importance of the student perspective on school, they are claiming that research on the work of schools needs to be supplemented so that it also includes the following: 1 See Truedsson, L. Vad händer i skolan. Resultat från den nationella utvärderingen av grundskolan våren 1992. (“What goes on at School. Findings from the national evaluation of comprehensive school, spring 1992”). National Agency for Education, 1993. 7 A Good Enough School I 1) students’ own experiences and thoughts concerning what goes on at school; 2) what happens in the classroom or elsewhere at school above and beyond or parallel to what appears or is expected to take place; 3) the ways in which different categories of sudents think or function at school (op.cit. p 16, our italics). A precondition in this respect, according to Lindblad, is that use be made of a more varied and sensitive methodological arsenal than has traditionally been deployed in national evaluations. Other researchers have also pointed to the absence of the student’s view from research on education. In a wide-ranging review of the field of research relating to students’ experiences of school, Eriksson and Schultz draw this conclusion: “Student experience of curriculum has not received much attention recently from educators neither in conceptual work, nor in empirical research, nor in the conventional wisdom and discourse of practice does the subjective experience of students as they are engaged in learning figure in any way /.../ If the student is visible at all in a research study he is usually viewed from the perspective of adult educators’ interests and ways of seeing.” (1992, p 467 in Handbook of Research on Curriculum). Taking as a starting point the insufficient level of knowledge existing with regard to what children and young people genuinely experience in their everyday lives at school, we began to weigh up possible methods which would enable us, in a relatively simple fashion2 , to gain insights into what life at school is really like. Our aim was to find a method which in an open, honest and unprejudiced way could capture the knowledge which it is only reasonable to assume that students must have of a place where they spend almost 15 000 hours. In the process of sifting through the literature on methodology we came across an English study of life at a boarding school, presented in two publications (Lambert et al. 1968, 1970). One of the aims of this study was to investigate how being a boarder affects children. Among the methods adopted the researchers made use of diaries and letters, extracts from which provided the basis for the book The Hothouse Society. The book accords a prominent role to the students’ letters and diaries, and as a result the text has a very vital quality and throws open the door to the world of the boarding school.

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