New Zealand Journal of Teachers' Work
Not a member yet
365 research outputs found
Sort by
The Current Work of New Zealand Teaching Principals
Full text linkThe work of teaching principals is a lightly researched aspect of teacher
Intentional teaching for visual arts in Early Childhood Education: teachers’ practices and perceptions
Full text linkThe early childhood sector in New Zealand has a long-held tradition of free play and child-led pedagogy, influencing visual arts approaches with young children. However, alongside learning through play, New Zealand’s sociocultural curriculum highlights the active role of the teacher and intentional pedagogy. This article explores the practices and perceptions of early childhood teachers regarding visual arts through a mixed methods study, including a nationwide survey and an embedded case study. Data indicated that teachers are confused about the appropriateness of taking an active role during children’s visual arts learning, and about when to be intentional versus leaving children to play without interference. Such tensions appear to be founded in contradictory theoretical assumptions, and are evident through a lack of confidence, skills, strategies and language for teaching. The authors argue that professional learning could ameliorate these tensions by clarifying educational theories and identifying intentional visual arts teaching practices that align with current theoretical beliefs about how young children learn in early childhood
On the Periphery or at the Centre?: Ideas for Improving the Physical and Interpersonal Environments for Lesbian, Gay, Bi-sexual, and Trans-sexual/gender Students at a New Zealand Secondary School.
Full text linkDespite mandates that require schools to be safe places for all students, issues persist around the provision of safety for lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, trans-sexual, and trans-gendered students and staff. The current study reports the initial two stages of an action research project undertaken in a New Zealand secondary school, which aimed to enhance the interpersonal and physical environments for students with diverse gender identities and sexual orientations. The first phase consisted of data gathering, comprising an evaluation of the physical environment and a survey issued to students and staff. The second phase was the development of a plan for ongoing action and improvement, consisting of education, provision of safe spaces and meaningful support, and artefacts that communicate tolerance
Risky Choices – Autonomy and Surveillance in Secondary English Classrooms
Full text linkAchievement data from New Zealand secondary schools suggest that students from lower socio-economic communities have fewer opportunities to engage with complex content in subject English. This article examines this phenomenon by drawing on Foucault’s notion of governmentality and considers how a context of simultaneously increased autonomy and surveillance may shape curriculum and assessment choices. To explore these ideas, I use interview data from ten secondary English teachers in the wider Auckland region. I complement Foucault’s (1982) explanation of governmentality with Ball, Maguire, and Braun’s (2012) notion of policy enactment to explore spaces of both compliance and resistance
Risk taker or risk averse? Stories from early childhood leaders that demonstrate the complexities involved in empowering young children to take safe risks in the outdoors
No full textRisk-taking in the outdoors provides opportunities for young tamariki to develop their physical skills and learn to self-manage risk. Within an early childhood setting many policies and regulations are in place to ensure that tamariki are kept safe from harm. Early childhood leaders are tasked with the challenge of managing the tension between providing sufficient opportunities for tamariki to engage in risk-taking while following regulations to successfully eliminate any hazards that could cause serious harm. The scenarios and voices of the key informants presented in this article demonstrate ways that safe risk-taking opportunities can be implemented while navigating this tension
The degradation of teachers’ work, loss of teachable moments, demise of democracy and ascendancy of surveillance capitalism in schooling
Full text linkThe idea that teachers can and therefore must ‘accelerate’ learning, progress, and achievement for ‘priority’ groups of students has become something of a crusade in official schooling policy discourse in Aotearoa New Zealand over the last couple of decades (e.g., Education Review Office, 2013). The New Zealand sociologist Roy Nash once scathingly referred to this achievement ideology as ‘state-sponsored possibilism’ enacted through ‘bureaucratic fiat’ and fuelled by “impatient political insistence that schools must demonstrate almost immediate ‘equality of results’” (Nash, 2003, p. 187). Here, I offer some very preliminary reflections on the ongoing process of dehumanising teachers’ labour in Aotearoa New Zealand, the accompanying loss of teachable moments that channel children’s innate curiosity about their natural, social and cultural worlds, and the consequential decline in our ability even to imagine the possibility of democratic forms of public schooling. In terms of the provocation for my reflections here, I also comment on what appears to be a foreshadowing of the “rise of digital technology and the creation of elaborate data architectures within and across organizations” (Power, 2022, p. 4), using the example of our national English medium schooling system and, specifically, the proliferation of Microsoft’s Office 365 Education software suite
Board of Trustees
Full text linkThis brief overview of my research explores the impact of one aspect of New Zealand's self-managing reforms on the changing and predicted gender profile of the principalship in primary schools. The research in progress is a national study of boards of trustees' selection practices of principals carried out in 2002. It examines how trustees interpret and act upon often contradictory and conflicting official discourses from self-managing policies and Equal Employment Opportunities (EEO) legislation, as well as populist discourses mobilised by the media. Using feminist discourse theory (Bacchi 2000) I argue that the reforms have not contributed to a significant shift in the gender diversity representation of the principalship
Increasing Internationalisation of the Primary Sector: Funding the Coffers and Encouraging Cultural Diversity, or Disadvantaging
Full text linkThis study reports the findings of an export education levy funded, small-scale collaborative research projected conducted with 10 primary and intermediate schools in the greater Auckland region about the impact of international students on the workload of teachers. Findings revealed that leaders considered the compliance issues associated with international students were very high, but the additional income generated by these students was useful. Responses from the teachers 131 teachers surveyed were mixed as to the impact on workload of hosting international students. The research team proposed two levels of recommended changes for practice. The first involved reflections of the changes that could be implemented in practice in the local context of these schools, and the second wider national policy implications directed towards the Ministry of Education and the export education industry
Education's 'Inconvenient Truth': Part Two – The Middle Classes Have Too Many Friends in Education
Full text linkThis is the second part of an article about how schooling, long geared to the concerns and interests of the middle classes, remains so, and is becoming increasingly so in some ways. In Part One, published in the last issue, I drew a parallel with Al Gore’s well-known film about climate change to argue for middle class advantage as education’s ‘inconvenient truth’. This is because while it is now pretty clear that education policies of recent decades have benefited the middle classes rather than the poor, there is at various points public, practitioner and policy denial of the problem. This denial reflects the self-interest of the middle classes and those who serve them. I focussed in Part One on the likely advantages provided by predominantly middle class school settings and how the middle classes have long targeted such schools for their children. This problem continues: indeed Part One showed how the New Zealand middle classes have been able to secure and in some ways improve their access to schools with a predominantly middle class mix under the zoning policies introduced in 2000. In this second part of the article I explore the problem of middle class advantage from another angle and look at how those who work in the education sector in key roles help to perpetuate middle class advantage in education. It seems the middle class have too many friends in education, which of course is another way of saying that not enough educators are really defending the interests of the poor
A Critical Review of Curriculum Mapping: Implications for the Development of an Ethical Teacher Professionality
Full text linkCurriculum mapping, a curriculum design methodology popularised in America has found favour in New Zealand schools as they develop their own curricula in line with the recently introduced New Zealand Curriculum. This paper considers the implications of curriculum mapping for the development of an ethical teaching profession. Curriculum mapping is problematised because it reflects positivist theories of knowledge and leads to further technicisation of schooling. The requirement that schools develop their own curricula could however open the possibility to develop pedagogically and theoretically sound curricula and offers teachers and managers the opportunity to regain ownership of their work as they review their current curricula, leading to engagement in a genuinely ethical and collaborative dialogue