APR 2005 Critical Incidents in Teachers' Lives
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ON APR 2005 Critical Incidents in Teachers’ Lives Bridget Donovan Institute of Education, University of London A Thesis Submitted for the Degree of Master of Philosophy 2004 ProQuest Number: U194593 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a com plete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest ProQuest U194593 Published by ProQuest LLC(2017). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States C ode Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. ProQuest LLC. 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106- 1346 2 Declaration I declare that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Bridget Donovan 23/07/04 The thesis, including footnotes, abstract, contents list, but not including references and appendices is 57 884 words. 3 Abstract Critical incidents in teachers’ lives This thesis derives from an experience that led to the author’s leaving the secondary school teaching profession. My experience resonated with the concept of critical incidents that is found in the literature on teachers’ lives. The thesis seeks to demonstrate the ongoing usefulness of this concept. It draws on sociological analysis and literature, in particular a Foucaultian perspective, to interpret data derived from three empirical sources: sensitizing interviews with teachers, fieldwork in a secondary school and a television documentary previously based on that school. The school was within a UK inner-city and it beganFreshstart a programme in 1999. It was filmed for a BBC television documentary in its first months and this was screened in 2000. Fieldwork within it took place in 2001. Teachers in the study were required to have either watched the documentary or been involved in its construction. The narrative structure of the documentary is itself driven by representations of critical incidents in the school and in individual teachers’ lives. Many teachers were thereby able to construct significant critical incident stories. Four of the fifteen teachers in the sample left the profession because of a critical incident. One remained undecided about his future and appeared not to have experienced a critical incident. Ten teachers identified critical incidents, but had continued with their careers. Their coping strategies are explored. The thesis argues that problems underlying critical incidents arise because of a disjuncture between teachers’ humanitarian idealism and the conditions of their employment, leading to requirements for emotional labour which impact upon teachers’ lives. By engaging with discursive reconstructions of past events, which can be conceived as critical incidents, teachers become aware of issues in education and consequently make changes. The majority of them are able to continue in their professional lives and careers, despite quite important problems, but a substantial minority withdraws. 4 CONTENTS 2 3 Autobiographical context Introduction 6 A teacher’s life 6 Critical incident theory 9 An English teacher/researcher 11 Academic aspirations 14 Fieldwork 20 Research questions: teachers’ voices 26 Summary 27 2 Approaches to understanding teachers’ lives Introduction 29 Epistemological location 30 Critical incidents 33 Stages 38 Foucaultian modifications 44 Power, truth and knowledge 47 Conclusion 54 3 Interviews Overview 57 Method 57 Table 1- Teacher interviews 58 Critical assessments 61 Coping strategies 66 4 Participant Observation Context 68 Table 2 - Teacher observations 72 Personal critical incident - Ms PE 74 Teachers at different stages in their careers 77 Extrinsic critical incidents - Mr T and Mr HT 80 Discipline and punish - OFSTED 92 Conclusion 95 5 Television Documentary Explication 97 Production 98 Product 107 Consumption 132 Conclusion 141 5 6 Conclusion Introduction 144 Retrospective 144 Table 3 - The teachers who feature in Chapter 3,4 and 5 145 Types of professionalism 148 A review of the argument 155 The contribution of this study 159 In conclusion 161 Appendices 1 Abbreviations 163 2 Interviewee data 164 Teachers who did not leave: critical incident 164 Teachers who did leave: critical incident 180 Teacher who disputes critical incident concept 188 3 Table 4 - Television documentary 192 References 229 6 Chapter 1 - Autobiographical Context Introduction One of the ‘soldiers of conscience’ in a recent news item, ‘Pte Hinzman said that the crystallizing moment for his decision to abandon the army was hearing a radio report while in Afghanistan about the sharing out of oil revenue in post-war Iraq’ (Warren, 2004). Such moments, episodes and/or experiences, I argue, are relevant in understanding change in everyday life. This opening chapter will demonstrate firstly, how my life as a teacher changed after a certain experience. Secondly, I will introduce the idea of critical incident theory as it resonates with such experiences. Thirdly, more autobiographical details will be given about being an English teacher whose interests have included discourse analysis. Also, an overview of the fieldwork component of the thesis will be charted. Finally, I will conclude the chapter with the research questions. A teacher’s life To introduce the origins of this research project I need to start with an episode in my life as a teacher. Towards the end of my secondary school English teaching career I simultaneously reached a turning point in both professional (mid-career) and personal (mid-life) stages of my life. It was what some researchers have called an ‘intrinsic critical incident’ (Measor, 1985: 62). It may not be representative, but it is relevant because it could offer an introduction into larger social questions. I started teaching English at the age of 22 in 1982, and this episode happened 14 years later during October 1996. Miller (1996), records the first female teacher as Comtesse de Genlis (1746-1830). She is a role model for me to correlate my experiences and ideas with. Towards the end of her career someone asked if teaching had been a passion for her. She replied, ‘It has always bored me, but now that I am old it is the only way that I can do any good’ (p.233). Together with Comtesse Stephanie Felicite de Genlis 7 (Wyndam, 1958) and other teachers, I began sharing the common ‘fear of tedium’ (Huberman, et al., 1997: 45) in classrooms from about my second year of teaching. To alleviate the monotony, I organized time out of classrooms. Taking pupils on trips became part of my curriculum: picnics, debating competitions, poems written on hilltops, drama festivals, film-viewing, working holidays on a kibbutz, and a fateful writing camp for gifted and talented students. Class outings were designed to broaden horizons and foster a love of English. A magazine reporter, Williams (1998), once wrote about a ‘special tour of the showroom and workshop of Jati Transport, Mercedes-Benz authorized distributor in Brunei’ organized by me, concluding that the ‘teacher and Jati hoped that, with the visit, the students could be better prepared to express themselves in their creative assignment which appropriately enough was entitledMy Dream Car’ (p.83). My crystallizing moment or critical incident occurred in Townsville, Australia where, at 37 years old, I was classified as an Advanced Skills Teacher (Level 1). I had unsuccessfully applied for three promotions during the previous two years. The fourth stage of mid-life transition was looming, although I still fell neatly into the third stage of the life cycle of the teacher as defined by Sikes, a researcher on the ESRC-funded project on teachers’ lives of 1985 in England. (More details of the life cycle stages concept will be described in Chapter 2.) For present introductory purposes, Sikes (1985) has suggested that throughout ‘the thirties the conjunction of experience and a relatively high level of physical and intellectual ability mean that in terms of energy, involvement, ambition and self-confidence many teachers are at their peak’ (p. 48). As a result of doing a lone reconnaissance for a tropical rainforest walk on a Writers’ Camp to safeguard 42 students, I landed myself in a deadly situation. My personal life and circumstances away from being a professional teacher were busy ones. I was supplementing my state teacher's income as a residential boarding-housemistress in an independent school. Research by Edelwich and Brodsky (1980) indicates ‘that money becomes more important if the job is proving unsatisfactory in other respects - e.g. if promotions felt to be deserved are not forthcoming’ (p. 17). Hence, to counteract growing dissatisfaction and to earn extra money I became responsible for more pupils, resulting in increased emotional labour for myself. Living there also allowed for friendships with colleagues from a different school policy system. My self-confidence was maintained by a strong sense of success as an English teacher. As a member of the residential staff I had responsibility for 36 teenage girls and was kept busy after school. My duties included supervising their nightly study programmes, seeing that their living areas were tidy, supervising meals, writing term reports and attending weekly meetings, as well as weekend duty. I also willingly gave up time taking boarders on outings in the school minibus. By the time the Writers’ Camp arrived towards the end of the year, I was beginning to feel weary and, in retrospect, maybe these were the first signs of a pending critical incident. I had become involved with an exciting Writers’ Camp and members of the profession from other institutions. We were catering for a select group of gifted and talented students from many schools in the region. The advisory teachers wrote complimentary things about my participation in the project. Bridget had been part of the Writers’ Camp planning group almost from the beginning.