Patricia Thomson
Biographic Data
| ID | 3681565 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Patricia Thomson |
| GIVEN NAMES | Patricia |
| FAMILY NAME | Thomson |
| SIGNATURE | THOMSON P |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Nottingham |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4801-0000 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 83 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 257 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 81 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1952 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Doctoral memes as public pedagogy? Or, heaven knows I’m miserable now
Social media afford the proliferation of doctoral memes across numerous, generally anonymous, accounts spread over multiple platforms – the timeline where the PhD candidate starts off gleaming with health and beaming in delight and ends up an overweight, dishevelled wreck. Or the exhausted cat who has managed to write one line of their thesis in an entire day. But should these memes be a cause for concern? After all, it’s just humour, albeit some…
Generative conditions for shared leadership in arts-rich schools
Some schools are able to generate sustained, widespread leadership practices. This paper adds to the corpus that explains how collective leadership has been developed in a distinctive set of schools, drawing on the Researching the Arts in Primary Schools (RAPS) project. Eight conditions appeared consistently across schools where leadership was distributed and dense: mutual trust across hierarchical levels, freely circulating expertise, endemic ag…
Beyond standardisation, subjects and syllabi: How primary schools organise for arts richness in an era of curriculum reform
As England embarks on its first comprehensive curriculum review in fifteen years, this paper offers critical insights from schools that sustained arts‐rich provision despite a policy landscape hostile to creative subjects. Drawing on data from the Researching Arts‐rich Primary Schools (RAPS) project—a mixed‐methods study of 76 arts‐rich primary schools in England—we analyse how these schools organise themselves to maintain robust arts provision. …
Why bother with arts education in schools
Enrolments in school arts subjects are falling in both England and Australia. There are various arguments made in an attempt to reverse the situation. The arts are said to be vital for the economy, linked to success in core school subjects, are educationally inclusive and important for their disciplinary knowledges. In this paper, based on my Radford lecture, I canvass these arguments, concluding that arts education, like the arts themselves, are…
A pipeline crisis or a sustainability crisis? Local and national succession planning for headteachers in England
Recruiting and retaining school leaders is a challenge in many systems worldwide. Previous research has identified three distinct ways in which succession planning can be conceptualised and approached: a ‘pipeline’ approach seeks to match supply and demand for the posts that need filling; a ‘pool’ strategy involves proactively identifying and developing a wider group of potential leaders who can step up when needed; while a ‘reservoir’ mentality …
The best of times, the worst of times: Continuities in school leaders' work in uncertain times
The COVID 19 pandemic created new challenges for school leaders. They worked very long hours in difficult circumstances. Improvising and responding quickly to poorly timed central guidelines had an adverse effect on their health and wellbeing. Our mixed methods studies show that leaders’ pandemic work was largely directed to establishing new management routines as well as dealing with people. Henri Lefebvre's rhythmanalysis allows us to see that …
Evidence informed policy? The Australian Education Research Organisation's borrowed knowledge-rich curriculum dispositif
‘Knowledge-richness’ is now being promoted in Australia by the Australian Education Research Organisation (AERO). Knowledge-richness is part of a curriculum dispositif which sutures together methods drawn from cognitive science, a subject-driven approach and performance-based summative assessment. Based heavily on the English instantiation of knowledge-richness, the dispositif potentially heralds radical changes in the Australian curriculum and t…
What needs to happen for school autonomy to be mobilised to create more equitable public schools and systems of education
The series of responses in this article were gathered as part of an online mini conference held in September 2021 that sought to explore different ideas and articulations of school autonomy reform across the world (Australia, Canada, England, Ireland, the USA, Norway, Sweden and New Zealand). It centred upon an important question: what needs to happen for school autonomy to be mobilised to create more equitable public schools and systems of educa…
Schools and Cultural Citizenship: Arts Education for Life
‘Why study the arts at school?’ This book offers a fresh perspective on this question. Informed by rigorous research, the book argues that the arts help young people to develop key skills, knowledge and practices that support them to become both critical appreciative audiences and socially engaged cultural producers. Drawing on a three-year study in partnership with the Royal Shakespeare Company and Tate art museum, Schools and Cultural Citizensh…
Cultural capitals matter, differentially: A Bourdieusian reading of perspectives from senior secondary students in England
Ofsted, the inspection authority in England, has told schools to ensure that all students have access to cultural capital, taken as a canon of music, literature and art. In this paper, we trouble this guidance by analysing conversations with 1447 senior secondary students. The students reported that the arts offered considerable personal benefits, as well as creative self-expression (visual art) and vocational and networking skills (performing ar…
Vox Poetica: Bringing an arts-based research method to school leaders’ lockdown experiences
The work of school leaders during lockdown has been emotionally charged and emotionally draining, affecting immediate well-being and longer term career plans. To communicate the emotions that we were told about and which were obvious during interviews with serving headteachers, we turned to arts-informed methods. We used poems made from transcripts to complement and supplement the analysis of 58 interviews and survey responses (n = 1491). This pa…
The Routledge Doctoral Student's Companion: Getting to Grips With Research in Education and the Social Sciences
The trust deficit in England: Emerging research evidence about school leaders and the pandemic
Limited research has assessed the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on school leaders specifically. Working together with England's two leader associations, we designed and conducted a national survey of almost 1500 leaders in summer 2021 to assess the impact of the pandemic on their well-being and career plans. This paper introduces some initial findings and discusses the implications for policy and practice
Changing Play – writing, researching and learning in an early years arts project
‘Changing Play’ is an ongoing project initiated by education curators from the Serpentine, a prestigious London art gallery, working with the Portman children’s centre nursery. Viewed by curators as a collaboration between artist, children’s centre staff and parents, and the gallery, Changing Play combines art and action research, and expands the boundaries of the gallery. In the words of one of the education curators, ‘the project is about socia…
The pedagogical logics of arts-rich schools: A Bourdieusian analysis
The arts are under threat in English schools. But some schools and teachers work against the trend. To understand how they continue to offer rich arts experiences to students, we bring Bourdieusian thinking to arts teacher practices that were common across the 30 secondary schools we studied for three years. In addition to a flexible approach to the curriculum which encouraged independence, intellectual challenge and risk-taking, teachers also en…
Creativity Policy, Partnerships and Practice in Education
Subject Choice As Everyday Accommodation /Resistance: Why Students In England (Still) Choose The Arts
High school students are expected to make choices about which subjects they study. These choices are not completely open; however, they are steered by what is on offer, previous achievement and conversations with teachers, family and friends; choices are patterned by class, gender, able-ness and race. We offer the perspective of subject choice as resistance. The paper uses student focus group data from a 3-year study of the visual and performing …
Ethnographic explorations of the arts and education: An introduction
Thinking about the school most of the time: Studio as generative metaphor for critical reflection
Busy leaders need time to reflect and renew. They need to consider the particularities of their school and the ways in which they can work with others in the school community to address pressing issues, as well as to make future plans. The metaphor of the studio offers some helpful avenues for thinking how this reflection might occur. Artists use their studios for respite, not knowing, generating new ideas, risk taking, integrating theory and pra…
A little more madness in our methods? A snapshot of how the educational leadership, management and administration field conducts research
The field of educational leadership, management and administration (ELMA) uses methods drawn primarily from cognate educational disciplines. But does this matter? This paper explores the methods used in recently published papers through a snapshot of six issues of six ELMA journals. The analysis showed a preponderance of survey, interview and case study methods, with one journal, JEAH, also publishing papers using methods drawn from history, phil…
Creativity in teaching: What can teachers learn from artists
Since the turn of the century, there have been frequent expressions of concern about a perceived lack of creativity in UK schools, in both curriculum content and in teaching. Recently, as the emphasis on mathematics, science and technology has strengthened, serious concerns have also been expressed about the marginalisation of the arts and creativity in schools. In the light of these concerns, this paper reports in-depth, qualitative research int…
Alternative programmes, alternative schools and social justice
Alternative educational programmes and alternative schools have been a feature of the educational landscape for some 50 years or more. These alternatives cater for children and young people who have generally experienced a variety of forms of exclusion during their schooling (Arnold, Yeomans, & Simpson, 2009; Sparkes & Glennerster, 2002). In some jurisdictions, a common aim of alternative education programmes is to return students to ‘regular sch…
Going against the Herd: Psychological and Cultural Factors Underlying the ‘Vaccination Confidence Gap’
By far the most common strategy used in the attempt to modify negative attitudes toward vaccination is to appeal to evidence-based reasoning. We argue, however, that focusing on science comprehension is inconsistent with one of the key facts of cognitive psychology: Humans are biased information processors and often engage in motivated reasoning. On this basis, we hypothesised that negative attitudes can be explained primarily by factors unrelate…
Disciplinary regimes of ‘care’ and complementary alternative education
In schools, the notion of ‘care is often synonymous with welfare and disciplinary regimes. Drawing on Foucault, and a study of alternative education (AE) across the UK, and looking in depth at two cases of complementary AE, we identify three types of disciplinary regimes at work in schools: (1) dominant performative reward and punishment, (2) team-building and (3) therapeutic. We argue that while all three regimes aim to steer identified students…
Hugs and behaviour points: Alternative education and the regulation of ‘excluded’ youth
In England, alternative education (AE) is offered to young people formally excluded from school, close to formal exclusion or who have been informally pushed to the educational edges of their local school. Their behaviour is seen as needing to change. In this paper, we examine the behavioural regimes at work in 11 AE programmes. Contrary to previous studies and the extensive ‘best practice’ literature, we found a return to highly behaviourist rou…
Bringing Bourdieu to policy sociology: Codification, misrecognition and exchange value in the UK context
The task of social scientists is to find ways of investigating and understanding the social, political and economic world, in order to offer insights into everyday and public life in the past, present and future. Bourdieu's tool kit offers a particular way of theorizing the rules, narratives and self-held truths of social phenomena and of educational policy as a specific object of analysis. In this article I develop a series of propositions about…
Pedagogies of transformation: Keeping hope alive in troubled times
This paper seeks to challenge the view that there are no alternatives today to global neo-liberalism and its manifestation within schooling systems and educational practices, particularly as high stakes testing and reductive pedagogies and curricula. The paper challenges the fast and shallow learning endemic to these practices, arguing instead for a different temporality of learning and school change. Indeed, the paper argues that there is a pres…
Maggie’s day: A small‐scale analysis of English education policy
Policy sociologists typically research at large scale. This paper presents an example of a policy analysis which illuminates how policy is embedded in single incidents, lives and places. The case in point concerns the policy fetish for ‘closing the gap and raising the bar’. This rhetoric is taken to mean improving the learning of all students, while at the same time producing a more equitable, quality education system. In the case in point, we mo…
Just ‘good and bad news’? Disciplinary imaginaries of head teachers in Australian and English print media
Australian and English print media are actively engaged in producing reports that claim to find the ‘best schools’, the ‘real state of education’, and ‘star head teachers’. This article considers the production of knights and dames, maverick heads and struggling schools. It argues that some of these stories are clearly the products of departmental press bureau activities and policy agendas. It shows, however, that even those stories intended to c…
Beyond records and representations: Inbetween Writing in Educational Ethnography
Ethnographers are particularly interested in writing. They have paid particular attention to the practices of making field notes and to the ways in which their public texts represent those that they have encountered and studied. To date there has been less attention paid to the kinds of writing that used to make sense of experiences in the field. We call this inbetween writing. By examining our own processes of inbetween writing, and drawing on t…
From ‘consulting pupils’ to ‘pupils as researchers’: A situated case narrative
Schools in England are now being encouraged to ‘personalise’ the curriculum and to consult students about teaching and learning. This article reports on an evaluation of one high school which is working hard to increase student subject choice, introduce integrated curriculum in the middle years and to improve teaching and learning while maintaining a commitment to inclusive and equitable comprehensive education. The authors worked with a small gr…
Why do academics blog? An analysis of audiences, purposes and challenges
Academics are increasingly being urged to blog in order to expand their audiences, create networks and to learn to write in more reader friendly style. This paper holds this advocacy up to empirical scrutiny. A content analysis of 100 academic blogs suggests that academics most commonly write about academic work conditions and policy contexts, share information and provide advice; the intended audience for this work is other higher education staf…
Data, data everywhere – but not all the numbers that count? Mapping alternative provisions for students excluded from school
It is now mandatory for English schools to ensure that young people, under 16 years of age, who are excluded from school are placed in an education and training programme within 12 days. The programme must be at least half time, and should offer a meaningful and balanced curriculum. The Every Child Matters agenda also suggests that schools must coordinate services with other agencies to ensure that young people deemed ‘at risk’ are assisted to st…
The Failure of Dissertation Advice Books: Toward Alternative Pedagogies for Doctoral Writing
Anxious doctoral researchers can now call on a proliferation of advice books telling them how to produce their dissertations. This article analyzes some characteristics of this self-help genre, including the ways it produces an expert–novice relationship with readers, reduces dissertation writing to a series of linear steps, reveals hidden rules, and asserts a mix of certainty and fear to position readers “correctly.” The authors argue for a more…
Headteacher autonomy: A sketch of a Bourdieuian field analysis of position and practice
Bourdieu argued that his research was biographical: he sought to reflexively understand the social production of many of his life experiences without resorting to the illusion that they were unique, a-historical and transparent. To this end he systematically developed and applied a methodological toolkit, built around the concepts of field, capitals and habitus. Following Bourdieu's argument about the social-personal, I seek in this paper to focu…
Slappers like you don’t belong in this school’: The educational inclusion/exclusion of pregnant schoolgirls
Policy in England identifies pregnant schoolgirls as a particularly vulnerable group and emphasises the importance of education as a way of improving the life chances of those who become pregnant while young. This paper draws on repeat interviews conducted over a twelve‐month period to compare and contrast the stories of four young women. The narratives show that despite a common policy framework, there is great variability between schools in sta…
Policy rhetoric and the renovation of English schooling: The case of Creative Partnerships
Facing difficulties in the implementation of its ‘standards’ agenda, the English government has recently introduced a set of policy strategies and initiatives which seek to promote enjoyment, innovation and creativity in education. One such initiative is Creative Partnerships (CP). Funded predominantly from the Arts portfolio, CP brings creative practitioners into schools with the intention of bringing change to teaching and learning, and, more w…
How Principals Lose 'Face: A Disciplinary Tale of Educational Administration and Modern Managerialism
Hugs and behaviour points: Alternative education and the regulation of ‘excluded’ youth
In England, alternative education (AE) is offered to young people formally excluded from school, close to formal exclusion or who have been informally pushed to the educational edges of their local school. Their behaviour is seen as needing to change. In this paper, we examine the behavioural regimes at work in 11 AE programmes. Contrary to previous studies and the extensive ‘best practice’ literature, we found a return to highly behaviourist rou…
Teaching like an artist: The pedagogic identities and practices of artists in schools
This article reports findings from an ethnographic study of the arts curriculum and pedagogy in a British primary school. The policy context for the study is the school's involvement in promoting creative partnerships between teachers and artists. The pedagogies of three different artist‐led projects are analysed, using a Bernsteinian framework, and are characterised in relation to notions of ‘competence’ and ‘performance’ pedagogies. These chara…
Romancing the market: Narrativising Equity in Globalising Times
Despite the ongoing production of statistics about inequities in education, national policy agendas seem incapable of getting traction on the everyday realities of the schooling which re/produces them. This paper is a think-piece which uses narrative analysis to explore some of the meaning-making processes that are implicated in this stalemate. Mobilising Lyotard's notion of a performative master narrative, that of the globalised economy with its…
Girls and gender in alternative education provision
UK Government policy states that all young people aged 14–19 are entitled to a broad and balanced curriculum, with access to ‘personalised’ education and training pathways. With boys currently leading the statistics on exclusion, girls’ educational and social needs are often sidelined in alternative education provision, as the majority of education and training programmes are populated by and designed for boys. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork f…
Headteacher critique and resistance: A challenge for policy, and for leadership/management scholars
Educational leadership/management scholars have undertaken work which documents the difficulties particular headteachers face when implementing policy. Some have suggested that headteachers mediate policy, ensuring the best possible outcomes for their schools, but there is also critique of this argument and a counter‐suggestion that heads ought to resist the imposts of conservative, marketised policies which produce and reproduce educational ineq…
A little more madness in our methods? A snapshot of how the educational leadership, management and administration field conducts research
The field of educational leadership, management and administration (ELMA) uses methods drawn primarily from cognate educational disciplines. But does this matter? This paper explores the methods used in recently published papers through a snapshot of six issues of six ELMA journals. The analysis showed a preponderance of survey, interview and case study methods, with one journal, JEAH, also publishing papers using methods drawn from history, phil…
Scaling up’ educational change: Some musings on misrecognition and doxic challenges
Educational policy-makers around the world are strongly committed to the notion of ‘scaling up’. This can mean anything from encouraging more teachers to take up a pedagogical innovation, all the way through to system-wide efforts to implement ‘what works’ across all schools. In this paper, I use Bourdieu’s notions of misrecognition to consider the current orthodoxies of scaling up. I argue that the focus on ‘process’ and ‘implementation problems…
Creative partnerships? Cultural policy and inclusive arts practice in one primary school
This article traces the ‘cultural turn’ in UK educational policy through an analysis of the Creative Partnerships policy (New Labour's ‘flagship programme in the cultural education field’) and a consideration of an arts project funded under this initiative in one primary school. It argues that current educational policy foregrounds the economic importance of cultural activity and its contribution to the social inclusion agenda. However, ‘creativi…
The Methodology of Students-as-Researchers: Valuing and using experience and expertise to develop methods
n\t\t\t\t\tStudents in England are increasingly involved in consultation and governance of schools. Some are also involved in researching their own learning, how they are taught, the kinds of curriculum on offer, and school policies and practices. In this article, we suggest that this could be seen as a form of “standpoint research”. We suggest that one way standpoint can be exercised is via the construction of experience-based research tools. We…
The trust deficit in England: Emerging research evidence about school leaders and the pandemic
Limited research has assessed the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on school leaders specifically. Working together with England's two leader associations, we designed and conducted a national survey of almost 1500 leaders in summer 2021 to assess the impact of the pandemic on their well-being and career plans. This paper introduces some initial findings and discusses the implications for policy and practice
Ideas for changing educational systems, educational policy and schools
This paper argues the need for new ideas to assist in the creation of a new social imaginary post-neo-liberalism to frame rethought educational systems, policy and schooling. This is an attempt to reclaim progressive, democratic and social justice purposes for schooling well beyond dominant human capital renditions. While acknowledging the significance of ideas to this agenda, the paper also acknowledges that more socially just schooling systems …
Researching bullying with students: A lens on everyday life in an ‘innovative school’
Bullying is a serious problem in schools. This paper reports on a project in which the authors worked with a group of secondary students in an innovative school in the north of England to research issues of bullying and safety. The student researchers used photographs to stimulate conversations with focus groups of their peers. The data showed that while there was little serious bullying in the school, there was an everyday practice of name‐calli…
The Literature of Patronage, 1580–1630
Sir Thomas Wyatt: Classical Philosophy and English Humanism
Iris Murdoch's Honest Puppetry‐The Characters of Bruno's Dream
George Sand and the Victorians
The Two Georges
Independents on Television
Other| June 01 1983 Independents on Television Selected Works from Communications Update, including The Very Reverend Deacon b. Peachy, by Milli latrou and Ron Morgan; Gang of Four, by Barbara Aria and Steve Moore; A Matter of Facts, by Eric Mitchell; Crime Tales, by Robert Burden and Dictelio Cepeda; Lighter Than Air, by Mark Magill; Watch Being Watched, by Stephen Torton; and Qued Nefifik: A Foreign Movie, by Liza Bear at the Kitchen, New York …
A Tower of Babel
News| December 01 1984 A Tower of Babel: ’Video 84’ in Montreal Patricia Thomson Patricia Thomson Patricia Thomson is a free-lance film and video critic living in New York City. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Afterimage (1984) 12 (5): 3. https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.1984.12.5.3 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn T…
Ordinary people
Review| October 01 1984 Ordinary people The Pursuit of Happiness by Julie Gustafson and John Reilly distributed by Global Village, 454 Broome St., New York, N.Y. 10012 Patricia Thomson Patricia Thomson Patricia Thomson is a freelance film and video critic living in New York City Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Afterimage (1984) 12 (3): 15–16. https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.1984.12.3.15 Views Icon Views Artic…
Atomic Reactions
Other| April 01 1984 Atomic Reactions Patricia Thomson Patricia Thomson Patricia Thomson is a film and video critic living in New York. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Afterimage (1984) 11 (9): 5–10. https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.1984.11.9.5 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Ic…
World Information, Inc
Review| June 01 1985 World Information, Inc. Information and the Crisis Economy by Herbert I. Schiller Ablex Publishing Company (Norwood, N.J.)/ 134 pp./$22.50 (hb) Patricia Thomson Patricia Thomson Patricia Thomson is a film and video critic living in New York City. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Afterimage (1985) 13 (1-2): 32–33. https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.1985.13.1-2.32 Views Icon Views Article conte…
Video and Electoral Appeal
Other| February 01 1985 Video and Electoral Appeal Patricia Thomson Patricia Thomson Patricia Thompson is a film and video critic living in New York. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Afterimage (1985) 12 (7): 8–11. https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.1985.12.7.8 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permi…
The village voice
Review| November 01 1986 The village voice To Taste a Hundred Herbs: Gods, Ancestors and Medicine in a Chinese Village by Carma Hinton and Richard Gordon distributed by New Day Films, % Karol Media, 22 Riverview Dr., Wayne, NJ 07470 Patricia Thomson Patricia Thomson Patricia Thomson is a film and video critic living in New York City. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Afterimage (1986) 14 (4): 19–20. https:/…
What Goes Up Must Come Down
News| April 01 1986 What Goes Up Must Come Down Patricia Thomson Patricia Thomson Patricia Thomson is a film and video critic living in New York. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Afterimage (1986) 13 (9): 3. https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.1986.13.9.3a Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions…
Under fire on the home front
Other| April 01 1987 Under fire on the home front: An interview with Jon Alpert Patricia Thomson Patricia Thomson Patricia Thomson is a film and video critic living in New York City. This article was made possible by a writing grant from the media program of the New York State Council on the Arts. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Afterimage (1987) 14 (9): 8–10. https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.1987.14.9.8 Views…
Move over Rover! An essay/assay of the field of educational management in the UK
UK educational administration scholars have undertaken a survey to redefine the field of knowledge in educational management and/or administration. In responding to the resulting corpus of work, I argue that that this is an exercise in ‘turf talk’. I draw on theorizations of the socio-spatialities of fields of knowledge to consider educational management and/or administration and its border scuffles with policy sociology and the exclusion of deba…
How Principals Lose 'Face: A Disciplinary Tale of Educational Administration and Modern Managerialism
No more managers-r-us! Researching/teaching 'schools in challenging circumstances
Just ‘good and bad news’? Disciplinary imaginaries of head teachers in Australian and English print media
Australian and English print media are actively engaged in producing reports that claim to find the ‘best schools’, the ‘real state of education’, and ‘star head teachers’. This article considers the production of knights and dames, maverick heads and struggling schools. It argues that some of these stories are clearly the products of departmental press bureau activities and policy agendas. It shows, however, that even those stories intended to c…
Severed Heads and Compliant Bodies? A speculation about principal identities
When I had to reapply for my own position as principal I felt as if I was facing the prospect of losing a part of myself. Conversations with other women colleagues confirmed that I was not alone in this response. Taking this as my cue, I explore the notion of principal “identification” practices—that is the continuing process of forming a “principal identity”—through personal narrative, a Cartesian metaphor and emerging research evidence. In part…
Bringing Bourdieu to policy sociology: Codification, misrecognition and exchange value in the UK context
The task of social scientists is to find ways of investigating and understanding the social, political and economic world, in order to offer insights into everyday and public life in the past, present and future. Bourdieu's tool kit offers a particular way of theorizing the rules, narratives and self-held truths of social phenomena and of educational policy as a specific object of analysis. In this article I develop a series of propositions about…
An arts project failed, censored or … ? A critical incident approach to artist–school partnerships
When a successful primary school engaged a writer to work with children on an arts project, the teachers and the writer thought that the result would be a lively, publishable product. When the writer worked with the children, he thought that he should use the children's experiences and ideas as a basis for meaningful and engaged composition. However, the result was a text which the head‐teacher and her staff felt was inappropriate. They were conc…
Researching bullying with students: A lens on everyday life in an ‘innovative school’
Bullying is a serious problem in schools. This paper reports on a project in which the authors worked with a group of secondary students in an innovative school in the north of England to research issues of bullying and safety. The student researchers used photographs to stimulate conversations with focus groups of their peers. The data showed that while there was little serious bullying in the school, there was an everyday practice of name‐calli…
Miners, diggers, ferals and show‐men: School–community projects that affirm and unsettle identities and place
n\t\t\t\t\tMany contemporary sociologists suggest that a feature of modern life is that the practices and identities associated with 'place' are eroded. The local no longer matters in everyday life as it once did. Some national governments are persuaded of the possibility of an urban dystopia of Orwellian dimensions, and have found a response in theories and rhetorics of social capital, citizenship and communitarianism. They have instituted strat…
From ‘consulting pupils’ to ‘pupils as researchers’: A situated case narrative
Schools in England are now being encouraged to ‘personalise’ the curriculum and to consult students about teaching and learning. This article reports on an evaluation of one high school which is working hard to increase student subject choice, introduce integrated curriculum in the middle years and to improve teaching and learning while maintaining a commitment to inclusive and equitable comprehensive education. The authors worked with a small gr…
If these walls could speak: Reading displays of primary children's work
The first thing a visitor notices when entering Hollytree primary school is the art-work displayed on every wall. This paper, based on a three-year ethnographic study of the school, mobilizes field notes and interview and photographic data to probe the meanings of this visual ‘display’. We argue that the walls (re)produce and promote normative meanings of ‘good work’, the ‘good student’, the ‘good teacher’ and the ‘good school’, which serve both …
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