Table Of ContentROUTLEDGE LIBRARY EDITIONS:
EDUCATION
SCHOOLS TEACHERS & TEACHING
SCHOOLS TEACHERS & TEACHING
Edited and Introduced by
LEN BARTON AND STEPHEN WALKER
Volume 218
First published in 1981
This edition first published in 2012
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SCHOOLS
TEACHERS &
TEACHING
Edited
and Introduced by
Len Barton
and Stephen UUlker
® The Falmer Press
A member of the Taylor & Francis Group
©This selection and editorial matter copyright 1. Banon and S. Walker 1981. 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 the prior permission in
writing from the Publisher.
First published 1981
ISBN limp 0 905273 22 2
cased 0 905273 23 0
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Contents
Preface 1
1 CONTEMPORARY CONCERNS IN THEIR mSTORICAL CONTEXT
Introduction 7
Schooling for Delinquency
David H. Hargreaves 9
Left Policy and Practice and the Sociology of Education
Geoff Whitty 27
The Educational Worker? A Re-assessment of Teachers
Martin Lawn andJenny Ozga 45
Politicians Rule O.K.? Implications for Teacher Careers and School
Management
Colin Hunter 65
Contradictions of Control: Elementary Education in a Mining District
1870-1977
BzlI Wzlliamson 77
The Double Burden of Class and Gender in the Schooling of
Working-Class Girls in Nineteenth Century England, 1800-1870
June Purvis 97
2 CONTEMPORARY CONCERNS AND THE SCHOOL SYSTEM
Introduction 119
The Comprehensive Experience
David Reynolds and Michael Sullivan 121
A Community School
Colin Fletcher 139
The Teaching Nexus: A Case of Mixed Ability
Stephen Ball 159
Teacher Strategies and Pupil Identities in Mixed Ability Curricula:
A Note on Concepts and Some Examples from Maths
Peter Corbishley, John Evans, Catherine Kenr£ck and Brian Davies 177
Towards a Sociology of Assessment
Tricia Broadfoot 197
Known and Understood: Problematics in Developing an
Understanding of the Social Effects of Schooling
Paul Olson 219
3 CONTEMPORARY CONCERNS AND THE WORK OF TEACHERS
Introduction 241
Classroom Ethnography and the Definition of the Situation
Robert Stebbins 243
Teacher-Pupil Question-Answer Sequences: Some Problems of
Analysis
Stephen UValker 265
Strategies, Commitment and Identity; Making ·and Breaking the
Teacher
Peter Woods 283
Contrastive Rhetoric and Extremist Talk: Teachers, Hegemony and the
Educationist Context
Andy Hargreaves 303
Ideology in the Staffroom? A Critique of False Consciousness
Martyn Hammersley 331
Contributors 343
Index 345
Preface
Len Barton, Westhill College
Stephen Walker, Newman College
The papers collected in this book are all versions of presentations made at the 1981
Westhill Sociology of Education Conference. This annual conference is organized
with the intention of providing an opponunity for those working in sociology of
education to reflect upon developments in the discipline and, also, of stimulating
further analysis and discussion. Each conference takes a specific area of debate in the
sociology of education as a central theme. Whilst no hard criteria have been established
for isolating which themes are given priority, an important principle that has been
established at past conferences is that debate should reflect as wide a range as possible
of different perspectives or analytical approaches. Given this principle, speakers
invited to the 1981 conference were provided with a general brief in which they were
asked to describe what they saw as the crucial sociological properties of the relation-
ship between society, schools and teaching. Originally this theme was selected
because it seemed to offer a basis upon which some contemporary issues like the
opportunities for managing some synthesis of macro- and micro-sociological
approaches in the sociology of education, or like the tension between structuralist
and culturalist approaches to the social reproductive function of schooling, might be
aired. However, as the conference proceeded the degree to which investigation of
teachers and their work has moved from a fairly marginal position in the sociology of
education to one in which it is regarded as having critical relevance was firmly
established. For this reason we have made this relevance the area around which this
book is organized. Not all the papers included in this volume directly address this
crucial concern. Nevertheless, it is our contention that, at the very least, each paper
raises issues which are inextricably related to what we take to be three important
dimensions of this concern. These are the problems of conceptualizing teachers'
ideologies and practices, the problems of investigating these ideologies and practices
and the way in which future development of sociology of education is contingent on
taking these twin concerns very seriously indeed.
Gifted with hindsight, perhaps we should not be too surprised that teachers and
their activities should be given the prominence identified above. Notwithstanding
the particular substantive concern, a great deal of inquiry in the past few years has
either started or finished with an identification of the crucial location of teachers in
educational processes. Be it as the I gatekeepers' of educational and social resources,
the actualizers of school values, as rule-makers, as the representatives of power elites
in schools, the distributors of cultural capital, as the carriers of societal values or the
mediators of societal contraditions, as reality definers and managers in classroom life
- teachers occupy the point where the various paths taken in sociology of education
converge. However, a good many of these teacher characterizations have emerged
through research and analysis which have other educational concerns as a main focus.
Indeed, though many pieces of research generate explanations of educational pro~
cesses in which teachers' ideologies and practices are nominated as crucial
1
Schools, Teachers and Teaching
components, there are few studies which make these affairs the organizing topic of a
sustained investigation. This is not to deny that important insights into teachers'
understandings, experiences and motivations have been produced; see, for example,
Woods (1980) and Grace (1978). What remains a problem, however, is that there is
something of a noticeable lack of co-ordination of findings in which the connections
between the results of rather disparate projects are clearly demonstrated and from
which a cumulative body of knowledge is established which permits one to chart the
ways in which the conditions of teacher action are articulated with other properties of
the educational world with some surety. In shon, it seems no real exaggeration to
observe that apart from classic studies such as Waller's The Sociology of Teaching
(1932) and Lortie's Schoolteacher (1975) we have no really developed study devoted
to a sociology of teachers' work.
Given this observation, we are pleased, therefore, to be able to introduce a col-
lection of readings that can be seen as identifying some of the problems and
possibilities of such an extensive project. Whilst recognizing that it would be absurd
to imagine that the discussions developed in the separate papers published in this
volume satisfy the totality of demands which will have to be fulfilled if a sociology of
teachers' work is to be established, we would still advance the claim that certain
discernible themes emerge from the collection as a whole which provide some
purchase on the problems involved in getting to grips with such an investigation.
Clearly, the range of considerations these themes invite the sociologist to pursue is
itself immense and no attempt is made in this introduction to describe all possible
avenues of discussion sign-posted in the book. However, in our view, the imponance
of the need to develop a more systematic, sustained and substantial sociology of
teachers' work lies in the contribution such a programme can make to our ability to
attend to cenain pressing contemporary concerns - contemporary concerns of the
social scientist and contemporary concerns of the educator. These concerns can be
distinguished as operating at three different levels - those relating to the historical
development of both the discipline and the educational system, those which more
closely relate to the structure and organization of schools and those directly linked
with the everyday practices that constitute 'teaching' - and we have used these levels
to provide a framework upon which the organization of the papers in the book is
based. This should not be taken as meaning that we hold the levels to be exclusive or
independent. In a significant number of the papers a key demand is for the precise
interrelation between these levels to be demonstrated. Thus, for example, Lawn and
Ozga argue that both the conditions teachers work in and their reactions to these
have to be understood in terms of their structural location in the labour process and
furthermore, that this location is essentially the outcome of a panicular kind of
historical development, the specifities of which require careful clarification if the end
result is to be comprehended. Andy Hargreaves explores the thesis that the ideas
teachers develop to cope with their routine affairs are imponantly related to their in~
volvement which is heavily conditioned by the way power is institutionally managed
in these schools. This kind of emphasis serves to delineate what we take to be one of
the many attractions associated with the development of a sociology of teachers'
work.. During the past few years the need to achieve a synthesis of macro· and micro-
sociological approaches to the study of education have been voiced fairly persistently,
although sometimes in a manner in which exactly how this can be achieved at the
substantive level is underdeveloped. A variety of educational topics might be seen as
areas which would permit this kind of development. One of the problems here,
however, is of defining a field of study in which structural and interactional
2
