Garth Stahl

STEM

STEM: What universities could do right now to help first-in-family men succeed

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Men from working-class and minority backgrounds are rarely represented in STEM disciplines.   For those who  choose to attend university, we know very little about their experiences or what motivates them.  

Our new data reveals a desire to secure steady employment and break a generational cycle of poverty were contributing factors.

The First-in-Family Males Project

We draw on data from The First-in-Family Males Project where we examined the experiences of males from working-class backgrounds entering higher education. First-in-family students are defined this way: those whose immediate family members have never attended university.

As an equity group, first-in-family students are often from working-class backgrounds, associated with manual labour, vocational trades, or low-skilled jobs.  Reflecting international trends, we know males from first-in-family backgrounds are the least likely to attend higher education in Australia.  The young men in this study attended schools in communities where only a select few would end up pursuing higher education.

Working-class young men in STEM

Within our project, one third of the participants enrolled in science subjects. That suggests masculinity still has a strong association with STEM.  Participants pursued a variety of different STEM-related degrees (e.g., advancedaths, forensic science, civil engineering, IT, etc).  STEM is often characterised as rigorous and competitive. We wanted to see how the aspirations of these young men were formed and maintained as they navigated the systems. When we analysed our results, we identified three key themses influencing their  aspirations: 1) desire for financial stability and fulfilment; 2) internalising pressure; 3) struggles with social acclimatisation to university.

Desire for financial stability and fulfilment

Within studies of the production of  working-class masculine identities, research shows  how these young men have a strong desire to secure forms of reliable employment so they can be the breadwinner. This desire has often kept this population away from university which can sometimes be seen as a more financially risky pathway.   In an increasingly post-industrial economy, traditional forms of working-class male employment are becoming  scarcer.  This is changing how young men see their post-compulsory education options.  

We also saw a desire to uphold the role of breadwinner and  a strong focus on employability with the young men in our study.

“I want to help my family out in the future.”

David: [With STEM] I’ve heard that there will be a lot of jobs available… I come from a poor family, so I want to help my family out in the future. … I guess I’m the one in the family that has to succeed in life I guess, help them out in the future, get us out of where we are right now financially. It’s mostly about the finances, so if I can help out with that, that’s what I want to do.

Besides the desire for financial stability, the first-in-family working-class young men we spoke with focused on self-fulfilment in what they chose to study. As Ruir, who studied in sport science, said:

I don’t want to just look for work because they pay a lot of money. I want something that pays a decent amount of money…. I want to have a secure job. I just don’t want to, like, struggle. I just want to be comfortable…I want something that pays a decent amount of money – but I enjoy waking up to it everyday.

Furthermore, some of the participants’ motivations seemed influenced by the suffering they saw with the older men in their family.

Levi: Without disrespecting my dad, I see him doing a career he doesn’t like. I use that as my motivation…

Internalising pressure

Many students in STEM disciplines find university to be stressful because of to its competitive nature. Students from low socioeconomic backgrounds are often very aware of the financial investment in their degrees and anxious about translating their degrees into secure employment. This adds a significant additional stress.  Data from The First-in-Family Males Project suggests there are various pressures shaping the experience of these young men.  Vuong, studying maths, said money contributed to a feeling of pressure: ‘The money that I – the debt that I have’ where he also said if he did withdraw from university, ‘I’d feel like a failure. I’d feel like my entire world would come toppling down.’   Another student, Ruir, noted:

I feel … pressure … to get my life, the highest I can get.

Isaac describes the pressures of university studies as always present:

Probably, just the 24 … Not 24/7, but constant thinking about uni all the time, and worry, not worrying, but thinking I got to do this, this, this, I still go to do that. I got this coming up. There’s just constant thinking about it all the time. It’s not bell to bell, start the day, do my school work, go home, that’s it.

According to Levi, he describes STEM higher education as:

I definitely think it has been emotional both stress – mix or at … times very stressful. Other times it’s just – it feels like everything’s falling into place and then something else is thrown at me. I definitely think it’s a lot of, it’s up and down, up and down and…

Struggles with social acclimatisation to university

Echoing research on the first-in-family student experience, many felt a struggle to feel a sense of belonging in higher education.  Isolation was a significant theme in the data.  For the boys studying STEM – a field which is still largely dominated by males from middle-class and elite backgrounds – the social context can feel very foreign and unsettling.  In considering how they negotiated a sense of loneliness, we note two main contributing factors: 1) how very few students from their disadvantaged secondary schools attended university and 2) the competitive academic nature of STEM which created social hierarchies anddivisions.

  Highlighting his class disadvantage, Vuong did struggle with the academic demands in STEM. He recognised how he was one of the only students from his secondary school to attend university and thought, ‘if I did this well, and I can match up with these types of students who did a much more higher end type learning in their schools or whatever. [But]and I came from a disadvantaged school’.

Another participant, David, suffered both socially and academically, leading him to eventually drop out:

I was way too behind, so if I maybe prepared better if I prepared better for uni…people … friends. That would make it a lot easier – sporting friends.  

David felt having friends with similar interests would have helped him feel a stronger sense of belonging.

What this tells us about young men in STEM

As policies continue to foreground how educators need to be engaged in raising aspirations for young people from disadvantaged backgrounds, it is important to ask what happens when aspirations are raised and how working-class young people who are first-in-family navigate their studies with limited resources.  

Educational success requires ample resourcing and a lack of resourcing leads to considerable additional pressures.   

The road is not an easy one

The data suggests that for the select few working-class males who choose higher education, the road is not an easy one.  This raises questions about the role of universities in helping students from disadvantaged backgrounds and what support mechanisms would have made the difference. Scholarships would help greatly. Institutions should also acknowledge these young men are in a dramatically different atmosphere compared to their secondary schools.  More targeted and personalised support for non-traditional students has proven effective in many higher educational contexts though, at the same time, many of the participants were reluctant to reach our for assistance.    

To conclude, as these young men navigate the challenges of their STEM degrees, they carry the weight of both personal and generational aspirations, making their success not just a matter of academic achievement but a testament to their resilience in the face of systemic barriers.  

From left to right: Garth Stahl is an associate professor in the School of Education at the University of Queensland. His research interests lie on the nexus of neoliberalism and socio-cultural studies of education, identity, equity/ inequality, and social change. Shaneeza Fugurally is a Masters candidate in the School of Education at the University of Queensland. Yating Hu is a PhD candidate in the School of Education at the University of Queensland. Tin Nguyen is a Masters candidate in the School of Education at the University of Queensland. Sarah McDonald is a lecturer based at the Centre for Research in Education & Social Inclusion in UniSA Education Futures, University of South Australia. Her research interests are in gendered subjectivities, girlhood, social mobility, social barriers, and inequalities in education. 

What happens now to students who are first-in-family to go to university?

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Students who are the first in their family to attend university remain severely under-represented, despite policy efforts to widen participation in Australian higher education.  Many first-in-family students come from low socioeconomic backgrounds, and, as a result, there has been extensive focus on how social class influences their experiences at university. However, there has been significantly less attention to the role that gender plays.

We conducted a study with 48 first-in-family students over three years – the First-in-Family Project – documenting their transition from secondary school into university.  They came from ethnically diverse backgrounds and were recruited from across state, independent and faith-based secondary schools. All participants presented as cis-gender. The research focused on their experiences in higher education and how their aspirations changed in relation to such experiences. 

In our research, published in Gendering the First-in-Family Experience: Transitions, Liminality and Performativity (Routledge, 2022), we found that during the transition to university, many of the participants questioned the gender norms of their school and family environments.  It is at university where many first-in-family students are first exposed to a diversity of gender identities which often contrast the gender identities present in their secondary schools. Some students spoke of the pressure they felt during secondary school to be a particular type of girl or boy, while they felt there were fewer constraints at university.  

Of the 48 participants, 9 withdrew from university, 7 chose not to attend, and 2 deferred. We found that very few of our participants enrolled in elite sandstone institutions. Instead, most participants chose to attend universities close to home. We were interested in the role gender played in the first-in-family experience, and focused on three areas: gender and the family; gender and influential teachers; gender and mental health.

Gender and the family

Our research found that families of first-in-family students are supportive of their children’s education. Still, they do not necessarily have sufficient knowledge of higher education to be able to give advice about navigating the system.  Instead, families focused on emotionally supporting students; extended family members were often influential and an important resource when first-in-family students struggled.

We also found that family life and expectations were significantly gendered.  Mothers were more often the primary resource in terms of emotional support for the participants. In contrast, fathers were less involved. This was especially true for the girls in the study, where part of what formed their aspirations for university was their desire to experience the opportunities and futures their mothers were denied. The boys in the study wanted to be seen as independent in their decision-making, while this was less apparent for the girls. Ultimately, all students in the study saw their lives as filled with more opportunities than their parents. 

Gender and influential teachers

Close relationships with secondary school teachers informed the aspirations of first-in-family students – but these relationships were gendered as well.  While all participants could point to specific teachers from their secondary school who had been pivotal in supporting them to reach their goals of attending university, there were notable differences based on gender.  For example, the boys tended to inhabit an identity centred around effortless achievement – of having a chilled or relaxed disposition – and sought out teachers who could push them.  In contrast, most girls portrayed themselves as ‘work-focused’ and diligent in their studies and forged relationships with teachers they perceived to be nurturing. 

Gender and mental health

Within research on first-in-family students, there has recently been increased attention to how struggles with mental health may impact their experiences. Research in Australian higher education has found these students rated financial concerns, time management, lack of sleep, and the demands around assessment as having a significant impact on their mental health. Within our study, over 40 per cent of young women presented a mental health issue while just under four percent of young men did. While the girls were open about their mental health concerns from the onset, over the course of the research, the young men began to either experience poor mental health for the first time or became more open with us about their mental health. 

Policy Implications: Improving the first-in-family experience

Drawing on our research, we seek to make recommendations at the policy level and for educators working in both secondary and higher education. 

Highlighting the role of gender, the boys seemed to suffer more from a lack of time management skills, which did not seem as much of a concern for the girls. Instead, the girls were more apprehensive about their ability to succeed when there was less access to personalised one-on-one support at university than they had experienced in high school.  

Furthermore, in terms of mental health, the girls in the First-in-Family Project were more open about their struggles with mental health. This highlights the gendering of mental health and how support services may need to be more attuned to gender differences for students from non-traditional backgrounds.

For those working in higher education, it is also important to note that many participants struggled to integrate socially with other university students who were mainly from middle-class backgrounds.  They found the experience isolating, and they doubted themselves.  There were few examples of students taking pride in their first-in-family status.  This was compounded by how many participants experienced confusion over pragmatics (e.g. timetables, scheduling, commuting) and how to navigate and conduct themselves at university. To conclude, while investments in widening participation are to be commended, the struggles of first-in-family students highlight how more can be done to familiarise students from disadvantaged backgrounds with what university entails.

Garth Stahl is an associate professor in the School of Education at the University of Queensland. His research interests lie on the nexus of neoliberalism and socio-cultural studies of education, identity, equity/inequality, and social change. Currently, his research projects encompass theoretical and empirical studies of learner identities, sociology of schooling in a neoliberal age, educational reform and gendered subjectivities.

Sarah McDonald is a Lecturer based at the Centre for Research in Education & Social Inclusion in UniSA Education Futures, University of South Australia. Her research interests are in gendered subjectivities, girlhood, social mobility, social barriers, and inequalities in education.

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Power of emotions and gender in education and in the work of educational researchers

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Emotions and gender identity play powerful roles in education. Every day, every child and every educator in every classroom will be affected in some way by their emotions as well as their gender identity. The times we remember so clearly from our own school days will likely be moments of high emotion and they will probably be connected, though often not in obvious ways, to gender identity.

Understanding the relationship between gender and emotions is especially important because it involves young people’s experiences with learning and can profoundly influence the outcomes of their schooling. It is a field of academic study that requires deep engagement by researchers. Gender and emotions remain complex areas to comprehend and research.

In this post we want to discuss emotions and gender identity in education and how emotions and gender identity shape the work of educational researchers like us.

While there is a strong and robust history of education research in the role emotions and gender play in education, there seem to be particular challenges for educational researchers who are working in this field today. For instance, educational researchers are negotiating issues such as the current pre-occupation with ‘toxic masculinity’, online social movements such as #metoo, and their backlash counter-movements #HimToo, the ‘click bait’ sensationalism around gender identity, and continuing broader struggles such as gender parity of political representation and equal pay, to name just a few. And all of this is within the ever-shifting economic, cultural and political landscape that is Australia today.

At the same time, we researchers see the need to acknowledge our own emotions and the link to our personal lives. Desire, envy, aspiration, fear, and so on, can affect our own understanding of our culture and our personal politics and thus the way we design and do our research. We believe it is important to recognise this and discuss it.

What is gender identity? 

Gender identity is how you personally experience your own gender, often aligned with societal norms, pressures and stereotypes, that is, what we know as ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine.’  Most young people understand their core gender identity and may find it difficult to think about themselves in any other way. However, gender identity is best thought of as a continuumas gender identity, gender expression, biological sex and sexual orientation. We know some media have sensationalised the Genderbread person occasionally but it is the easiest way to describe the continuum.

Gender identity can overlap with gender expression, how an individual outwardly shows their gender identity, but this is not always the case and can differ from assigned sex at birth.  Examples of this include body (including appearance) and expression (including how you act, how you dress).  In terms of emotions, some would say that feeling able to express your ‘authentic’ gender identity is important to one’s emotional and mental health. However, the notion of authenticity is necessarily problematic given the powerful gender norms that speak us into existence as male or female even before we are born. 

Many scholars call for a need to think critically about how gender and emotion inform how we live and work and how our gendered position influences us as researchers.  

How do gender identities and emotions affect learning spaces?

In considering norms, pressures and stereotypes concerning gender, researchers continue to be concerned with how certain spaces are gendered and gendering. Such spaces are imbued with emotions, for example, dominant ideals of masculinity tend to be aligned with emotional stoicism (and rationality) rather than weakness (and irrationality) which tends to be aligned with traditional femininity. As there are certain spaces where some emotions are considered normal, there will always be other spaces where there may be emotions that are considered inappropriate. For example, it may be considered appropriate, maybe even expected, for men to cry on the sports field but not in the classroom.

In spaces of learning, emotions powerfully circulate in ways that can build positive connections and relations, on the one hand, or aversion and disconnection, on the other hand. The power of emotions is important for people working in education to keep in mind.  Furthermore, some educational spaces may be considered ‘safe’ while others, in contrast, more ‘risky’ depending on one’s gender identity. For example, students have spoken about how there are certain pressures to enact or perform a certain gender identity and failure to do so can result in bullying.

How does this influence the work of educational researchers?

When designing and conducting our research in schools and other spaces of learning, many educational researchers continue to grapple with our own questions of gender, identity and emotions. We ask what does this confusion mean for how we research the lives of young people?  

In considering the relationship between gender, identity and schooling, feminist scholarship has argued that we must value our past and present experiences. For example, scholars cite the importance of thinking historically and what this may mean for “making the personal political” or “the person is the political.”  In other words, our own personal past experiences influence how we think and act politically in the present, so we need to reflect on those experiences and think about how they are affecting us now. These experiences and their affect create and re-create the contexts and processes of our research. They shape our views of what constitutes social justice, they open up particular spaces and enable particular avenues for our research as well as closing down other spaces and avenues. 

Why is it important for researchers to reflect on their own gender identities and emotions?

Professor of Feminist Theory at the London School of Economics and Political Science, Clare Hemmigs, argues that ‘in order to know differently we have to feel differently’. We need to reflect on how emotions powerfully impact on how we know our gender and thus how we might work towards knowing gender differently. Knowing gender differently is imperative if we are to change the destructive and harmful gender injustices that continue to permeate our world. 

As emotions and gender are powerful influencers in spaces of learning, it is important to consider how teachers teach and how children learn are constantly impacted in myriad of emotional and gendered ways.

We believe the more we interrogate our own assumptions, stereotypes and biases as educational researchers, and understand how we are influenced by the landscapes in which we work, the more we will be able to share our educational research into what is happening with emotions and gender in spaces of learning. 

For those who want more

A one-day symposium, Doing gender: relationships, emotions and spaces of learning was held at Deakin last August, involving scholars engaged in critical reflection on previous and current research in gender and emotions. It was a very challenging and productive day. Central to the symposium was reflecting on the role gender and emotions play in our current climate of toxic masculinity, equal pay, #he4she, the #metoo movement, etc.  Throughout the symposium, scholars discussed how our emotions arise out of how we understand our culture as well as our politics and what this may mean for research.

Find a detailed report of what was discussed that day HERE . The report includes some of the main themes of the day, a selection of significant theorists as well as recommended further reading

Garth Stahl, Ph.D. is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Education at the University of South Australia and Research Fellow, Australian Research Council (DECRA). His research interests lie on the nexus of neoliberalism and socio-cultural studies of education, identity, equity/inequality, and social change. Currently, his research projects and publications encompass theoretical and empirical studies of learner identities, gender and youth, sociology of schooling in a neoliberal age, gendered subjectivities, equity and difference, and educational reform. Garth can be found on Twitter @GarthStahl

Amanda Keddie is a Research Professor at Deakin University (Melbourne, Australia). She leads the program Children, Young People and their Community within REDI (Research for Educational Impact). Her published work examines the broad gamut of schooling processes, practices and conditions that can impact on the pursuit of social justice in schools including student identities, teacher identities, pedagogy, curriculum, leadership, school structures, policy agendas and socio-political trends. Amanda is on Twitter@amandaMkeddie

‘Rigor and grit’ in US charter schools and why it would be so wrong for Australia

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Charter schools represent an important era for public education in the United States, with unprecedented private resources being expended to actively increase school choice in urban markets. These so-called education reform efforts all occur under the rhetoric of educational equity. Charter schools are a significant part of how the United States is changing its schooling systems.

However, charter schools, and their practices, are highly contentious. As an ethnographer, I immersed myself within the charter school world and documented what I found there. This blog post is about my experiences as a leader in one charter school and how the ideologies of the education reform movement (evaluating teachers by test scores; awarding merit bonuses; firing teachers and leaders who do not perform; encouraging privatized markets) work in everyday practice.

I sought to explore the controversial schooling practices and strategies on the ground in one Charter School Management Organization (CMO). I documented how these neoliberal practices influence teaching and learning, school leadership, teacher’s professional identities, and students’ understandings of success.

What is a Charter School Management Organization (CMO)?

Networks of charter schools, known as Charter School Management Organizations (CMOs), operate as a franchise-model following a very specific institutional practice to ensure consistently high exam scores. Typically, CMOs, who are partially funded by tax-payer dollars, but can and do accept philanthropic funding, serve low socio-economic students in urban centres; have unprecedented autonomy from bureaucracy; and are subject to market forces and lottery systems. As they are free from union involvement, CMOs can set their own hours and have tremendous flexibility in their ability to hire and fire staff as necessary. CMOs are corporatized environments which are fast-paced and where there is great attention to detail.

CMOs are often characterized by extended school days, an exacting focus on improving standardised test scores, and trying to direct students living in poverty toward middle class aspirations. Largely unregulated, CMOs have consistently attracted unparalleled levels of funding and other resources that have allowed them to grow quickly.

Why should we pay attention?

Prior to the advent of charter schools in the United States, there existed no consistent evidence that significant numbers of students from low socio-economic backgrounds in large urban areas could excel academically and be admitted to elite Ivy League universities. So charter schools were seen as a new pathway for poor children to access elite tertiary institutions.

According to the ideology of the education reform movement in the US, the success of CMOs is down to actively recruiting young university graduates with little or no experience of teaching in a traditional public school system through a programme called Teach for America. For the reform movement and Teach for America, teachers who come from traditional teacher education programmes are taught to ‘care too much’ and can therefore succumb to a bigotry of low expectations for their disadvantaged students.

We have a similar system now operating in Australia called Teach for Australia. There is considerable controversy around this scheme in Australia, however it has been given new funding by the Turnbull Government.

We do not have charter schools in Australia however conservative groups regularly call for Australia to introduce similar schemes.

How do these schools work?

Many educational researchers have highlighted how CMOs capitalize on corporate practices, specifically a ‘Goldman Sachs model’ of zero-tolerance, where the bottom 10% of underperforming staff (those whose students get the lowest test scores) are fired each year. For CMOs, student academic attainment is viewed as the ‘profit margin’ and any potential threat to the ‘accrual of capital’ must be removed, in order to ensure the CMO’s growth and dominance. As failure to accrue profit (improve test scores) could entail an immediate shut-down of the CMO, nothing in these environments are left to chance.

While the institutional practices of a zero-tolerance approach to student behaviour and teacher underperformance in CMOs have been extremely contentious amongst the community of education researchers, these approaches simultaneously have become very popular amongst disadvantaged African-American and Latino parents competing for access to quality schooling in large urban centres. Parents from these communities want their children to go to the top performing charter schools.

In addressing how these schools work, the controversial institutional practices I experienced working in a CMOs cannot ignore the wider context, specifically the mass incarceration in the United States of Black and Brown bodies. During the course of my fieldwork, privately run prison systems in the state I was working in carefully monitored the third grade (age 10-11) test scores of male students of colour in order to predict future prison populations. Reactively, I was routinely told these ‘students have only one shot at a good education’ as if education would simply solve the detrimental effects of poverty.

Daily Life: socializing the ‘ideal learner’

Various researchers in education have demonstrated how there exists certain dispositions that contribute to the composition of a ‘good student’ or the ‘ideal learner’, and that these performances privilege a White middle-class, upwardly mobile subject. As an ethnographer, I want to show how leadership practices serve to illustrate how surveillance and control contribute to the development of a concern for test scores, competition, economic worth and personal interests amongst the students attending the CMO.

Students in the CMO I worked in are educated according to what Angela Duckworth calls ‘grit cultures’ where words like ‘tenacity,’ ‘resilience’ and ‘determination’ are embedded in daily dialogue. CMOs have been widely criticized for their high levels of discipline and militarization. While I focus on one school site, the experience of the students I worked with illustrates the wider realignment of opportunities contributing to the stratification of race and class practices in urban spaces within the United States.

To increase ‘grit’ and ‘resilience,’ many CMOs use slogans, motivational posters, incentives, encouragements and punishments all centered around purpose, high expectations, and strict discipline. When commands around routines and procedures are given, they are delivered with urgency. Magnetized timers—which are attached to the doors and the interactive whiteboard at the front of the room—are used to time students concerning everything from how quickly they speak to how quickly they move.

In order to ensure a “culture of exactness” and the importance of “sweating the small stuff” in the CMO teachers composed weekly schedules not around learning but instead around routines. These routines were practiced and re-practiced. The posters of inspiration, juxtaposed beside the posters of routines, adorn all the walls and classrooms relay to the students a certain uncompromising message around high expectations.

Power is established by making everyone seem the same and by expecting the same order and compliance from students without taking into consideration anything about the social and cultural backgrounds and family life. In the CMO, all students are held accountable for their daily actions and reactions; all students are fed on a diet where academic “rigor” and “grit” which are considered the only respectable foundations of success.

What is possibly most striking when walking through the corridors of the CMO where I worked was the frequency of commands concerning routines and procedures around learning, movement and the body. Depending on the teacher and the activity, commands permeate the lesson where, classroom management and pedagogy are blended. During the lesson, teachers frequently call out merits and demerits depending on students’ levels of compliance.

As the lesson is delivered, the teacher intersperses rewards and punishments, which are recorded on the clipboard which follows the class. For example, in a Science lesson, a teacher may say, “The founding father of physics is Newton. Derron, sit up straight. That’s a demerit. Newton lived in what year? Patricia? Yes, you are correct. Merit for Patricia.” As a ‘culture of exactness’ is held in high regard, students are required to answer questions in complete sentences and are demerited for not remembering to do so. A high level of surveillance and accountability is enacted at all times. Teachers, who are ever-monitoring, lead the students from one classroom to the next with clipboard in hand. When a teacher hands over a class the new teacher skims the clipboard to get a sense of the progress of the students throughout the day. These clipboard scores are then amalgamated and rewards are issued.

What is gained by this integration of discipline with academics is questionable as, in many cases, students come to depend on it. As this approach to pedagogic instruction is what students are used to, when the clipboard is not on hand, and the codified behaviour commands are not integrated with the teaching, the students become easily disengaged.

My research

My research aims to capture my own immersion in the CMO’s blend of neoliberal ideology and social justice values, which served as the cornerstone to all culture-building practices. My lived experience is central to the narrative. As I recount the daily life in the CMO, I am interested in the paradoxes of how neoliberalism works in everyday life and where charter schools choose to invest their energies in order to ensure a high level of consistency amongst students and staff who ascribe to a rigidly articulated neoliberal ideology.

 

If you would like to read more, my book Ethnography of a Neoliberal School: Building Cultures of Success is available from Routledge

 

Garth Stahl, Ph.D. (@GarthStahl) is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Education at the University of South Australia and Research Fellow, Australian Research Council (DECRA). His research interests lie on the nexus of neoliberalism and socio-cultural studies of education, identity, equity/inequality, and social change. Currently, his research projects and publications encompass theoretical and empirical studies of learner identities, gender and youth, sociology of schooling in a neoliberal age, gendered subjectivities, equity and difference, and educational reform.

 

Garth Stahl is presenting on this topic at the 2017 Australian Association for Research in Education Conference beginning 26th November in Canberra. The theme of this year’s AARE conference is ‘Education: What’s politics got to do with it?’ There will be over 600 presentations of current educational research and panel sessions at the conference over five days. Journalists who want to attend or arrange interviews please contact Anna Sullivan, Communications Manager of AARE,  Anna.Sullivan@unisa.edu.au   Follow the conference on Twitter #AARE2017

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Real-time coaching and how it helps educate new teachers: latest research

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Teacher training institutions across Australia are constantly striving to improve the way they educate our future teachers. As teacher educators we know how important it is to give our teachers an effective launch into their careers.

This means helping our students develop a wide range of teaching skills and knowledge but also a resilient disposition. We want our graduate teachers to be able to reflect on their practices and have the enthusiasm for ongoing learning that is required for long-term professional success.

Significantly, teacher educators today understand that pre-service teachers who see themselves as effective teachers are more likely to be committed to teaching and to respond positively to change. They are less likely to become stressed or burnt out.

With all of this in mind we decided to have a closer look at the role of real-time coaching in the education of our student teachers.

What is Real-Time Coaching?

Real-Time Coaching is where an experienced mentor teacher, skilled in giving immediate feedback, sits in with a student (pre-service teacher) while they are giving a lesson. The teacher educator (or coach) gives the student live, real-time feedback about their teaching via an earpiece during the lesson.

The difference with this coaching model compared to customary coaching practices is that the feedback is immediate, rather than being given after the lesson. As John Hattie famously showed us feedback is particularly effective when provided immediately, during task acquisition, rather than deferred.

We view coaching, generally, as a non-evaluative process in which two or more educators collaborate using planning, observation and feedback to develop productive teaching behaviours and dispositions.

Real-Time Coaching methods at the University of South Australia

We studied pre-service teacher’s experience of Real-Time Coaching (RTC) undertaken as part of a teacher education programme at the University of South Australia.

This RTC model provides direct instruction and feedback via an inner-ear coaching device (a Motorola CP476 CB Radio). As the pre-service teacher teaches their lesson, the mentor provides guided reflective practice in ‘real-time’ with the aims of promoting pre-service teacher’s self-assessment and reflective practice in order to foster a disposition toward continuous improvement.

Blending theory and practice through opportunities for active learning, the first phase involves the pre-service teacher reacting to the teacher-educator’s feedback and adjusting their behaviours in real-time during their micro-lesson.

Coaching typically highlights skills such as volume, tone of voice, positive narration, body posture and movement around the room, all skills determined to be key to effective teaching. The responsibility of the coach is to highlight, model and cultivate such skills.

To study the influence of Real-Time Coaching, two rounds of semi-structured interviews were conducted with pre-service teachers following their RTC sessions on campus. Interviews, which were around an hour in length, took place at a time and place of the pre-service teachers’ choosing.

Our findings

We found RTC to be effective and productive in three main areas. It encouraged: 1) personal goal development 2) reflective practice and 3) was seen as supportive.

Encouraged personal goal development 

Through the process of drawing attention to skill gaps, pre-service teachers found that RTC encouraged explicit goal development. For example RTC enabled Aaron to identify his tendency to notice negative student behavior. He determined to do things differently by setting goals with respect to key skills, like positive narration.

Ben and Samantha had not thought of the potential benefits of managing the classroom by continuing to scan the room while speaking with individual students; Samantha said this simply had “never occurred to me”.

Lucy, also, had not been aware that her delivery was largely monotonal, making it difficult for students to differentiate between her instructions, commands and feedback.

The RTC drew attention to the “simple things that you overlook” (Aaron) or, more specifically, the “things that an experienced teacher looks for” (Ben).

Through RTC, Ben developed the goal of building a positive classroom environment using techniques like ‘with- it-ness’, which he thought of as “the Eye of Sauron,” (as in Lord of the Rings) combined with the skill of positive narration.

Encouraged a reflective practice 

Pre-service teachers reported that Real-Time Coaching was effective in encouraging reflective practices. More resilient teacher identities develop when teachers are encouraged to reflect on their practice in ways that challenge their beliefs and values and enable them to accommodate new ideas and thinking. Engaging with others in professional conversations that include talking with, questioning and, sometimes, confrontation, in a supportive environment fosters reflective practice.

RTC’s skill-based model, which is concerned with developing teacher’s mindsets around effective teaching practice, worked to develop a pre-service teachers critical eye. They cast this ‘eye’ over their own practice, as well as the practice of their fellow students and the teachers they encountered during their practicums, identifying skills and skill gaps.

For example, as mentioned before, Lucy had not been aware that her delivery was largely monotonal, making it difficult for students to differentiate between her instructions, commands and feedback.

Lucy: I think [Real-Time Coaching] really highlighted what aspects of our teaching that we could improve on so you were able to see maybe things that you weren’t so strong in and then, cause you knew about them, you could work on them. You start to think, well, this is who I am, my mannerisms, my gestures, my … and that’s something you can look at and think, oh perhaps when [the coach] was talking about tone and it varying and all that kind of stuff. Whether some things that we’re doing is actually a deterrent …you know like you’ve got to kind of fine tune it so that’s something I’ve learnt is that it’s good to kind of look at your delivery, look at your whole personality and see whether you can round off some things or work on some things.

The RTC drew attention to the “simple things that you overlook” or, more specifically, the “things that an experienced teacher looks for”.

Students experienced RTC as supportive 

The pre-service teachers, though they cited stress and anxiety, universally experienced Real-Time Coaching as a supportive process.

It helped increase their positivity. It became, for them, a process of rapid development where resilience, confidence and efficacy were all working in tandem:

Velma: Like, I think I have a much more positive mindset after doing this because in the past you don’t really get that much time to like reflect on your teaching. It’s way after you’ve done it and you feel sort of powerless cause you can’t really change anything ‘cause it’s already happened but when you’re up there and if he says ‘why don’t you try it this way’ you know you’re improving on the spot, as you’re going, and I think that’s something you know. You feel like you’ve really achieved something and you’re constantly evolving.

Emotional support is needed

Coaching and mentoring strategies come with certain cautions. To be effective, coaching and mentoring must be done within a safe and professional environment where the needs of the learner are central and with feedback that is both layered and precise.

Early career teachers, in particular, require emotional support. In the RTC process, emotional support was heavily accounted for from the onset and founded on mutual respect between the coach and the pre-service teachers.

The university classroom was an enthusiastic environment with a lot of movement around the room, positivity and frequent ‘checking in’ to make sure pre-service teachers felt safe and secure. Rather than feeling judged by the process, pre-service teachers felt supported in their role as learners in both the university- and school-based sessions, enabling them to fully engage with the RTC process.

Sylvia: So if you kind of get stuck on what you’re saying or whatever, it wasn’t like you felt embarrassed because it was a supportive environment.

Real-Time Coaching has a role to play in teacher-training programs
To adequately prepare teachers for success in real classrooms, teacher-training programs must provide pre-service teachers with practice-based approaches. Furthermore, pre-service teachers themselves can contribute significantly to our understanding of the experience and effectiveness of teaching training methods, as evidenced with this case study.

Our research supports the position that RTC accelerates the development of the skills necessary for teaching such as growth mindset, orienting student teachers toward continuous improvement and promoting resilience.

We do not consider RTC to be a magic bullet and we believe it should be used with caution. Teacher preparation should never be reduced to learning a suite of skills with the educator’s role limited to that of a technician.

Our research, however, clearly supports the view that RTC can improve the delivery of curriculum within teacher training programs.

stahlGarth Stahl, Ph.D. is a Lecturer in Literacy and Sociology at the School of Education at the University of South Australia. As a sociologist, his research interests lie on the nexus of neoliberalism and socio-cultural studies of education, identity, equity/inequality, and social change. Currently, his research projects and publications encompass theoretical and empirical studies of learner identities, gender and youth, sociology of schooling in a neoliberal age, gendered subjectivities, equity and difference, and educational reform. He is interested in innovative methods and improving the quality of pre-service teacher training.

 

sharplinErica Sharplin is in the final stages of her PhD in education at the University of South Australia. She has extensive experience in qualitative research, having worked as a Research Assistant on several qualitative research projects over the course of her studies. Her PhD research is an examination of how middle school students in low SES context perceive their recreational spaces at school and the impacts on their behaviour. Prior to entering the field of education, Erica worked as a project manager and editor on several large scale publishing projects, primarily in legal education. In 2009, Erica was the recipient of the University of South Australia’s Satisfac Credit Union Merit Award in recognition of outstanding performance in a B.Ed.

kehrwaldBenjamin Kehrwald, Ph.D. is an online learning and education technology expert. As a researcher, designer and online facilitator, he is passionate about understanding and improving learners’ experiences with technology and technology-mediated social processes. His past work included educational development projects in the USA, Japan, New Zealand and Australia. In 2010, he was the recipient of the Distance Education Association of New Zealand’s Award for Excellence in Distance Education. He is currently a member of the Teaching Innovation Unit at the University of South Australia and is leading design and development of dedicated online programs in UniSA Online.

 

Further reading on Real-Time Coaching

Stahl, G., Kehrwald, B.A., & Sharplin, E. (2016) ‘Developing Pre-Service Teachers’ Confidence: Real-Time Coaching in Teacher Education’. Reflective Practice. (accepted)

Sharplin, E., Stahl, G., & Kehrwald, B.A. (2016) ‘It’s about improving my practice’: Learner experience of Real-Time Coaching. Australian Journal of Teacher Education. Vol. 41. Issue 5, 119-135.

And, in 2017, we’ll have a book out with Springer:

Stahl, G., Sharplin, E. & Kehrwald, B.A. (2017) Real-Time Coaching and Pre-Service Teacher Education. Springer, New York.

Problems with white working class boys plague UK school system

Education of boys, Education policy,

In the United Kingdom, it is widely documented both in academic circles and in the popular press that white working-class children consistently underperform at school. Today this ethnic group in the UK is considered to be one of the lowest performing in educational attainment. The underperformance of boys, especially of boys from marginalized backgrounds, has also been of concern here in Australia as seen with recent policies such as Boys: Getting it Right (2002).

Specifically in the UK there has been concern about the underachievement of white working-class boys and their lack of aspiration for many years. According to the UK’s Department for Children in 2008, “white young people have lower educational aspirations than most other ethnic groups”.

When I first began working as a teacher in England in 2002, I taught at a ‘failing’ school in Essex with a low level of teaching and learning (a school that has now been closed). I went on to teach in and around London for nine years, primarily in white working-class schools with high levels of disaffection. Throughout my professional and academic experience, I have been fortunate enough to engage with white working-class boys in a variety of different roles and contexts either as a volunteer, a teacher, an administrator, a friend or a resource; each role has increased my understanding of their identity construction and relationship to education.

These experiences taught me important first-hand lessons about disengagement, cultural deprivation and the provision of education in British society.

They also led me to spend a year researching the educational aspirations of 23 white working-class boys in South London (ages 14-16) in order to better understand how they saw themselves in relation to the educational provision provided. Through my study, it became apparent that, in order to understand the low academic achievement of the white working-class, it is imperative to examine what is happening in their lives now and to see what has happened to similar boys in the past.

The central questions which informed the research were:

  • What shapes the aspirations of these young men?
  • How do these young men comprehend their own disadvantage?
  • How do these boys make sense of expectations surrounding social mobility?
  • What factors contribute to them ‘buying into’ education or ‘buying out’ of education?
  • How does the system set them up to fail?

Many of these young men grew up in schools which were largely inadequate in terms of teaching and learning yet – paradoxically – were robust in preaching the ‘raising aspiration’ agenda. This agenda was so embedded in the politics of the time, the Michael Gove-era. It was a time when educational policy documents often promoted an idea of aspiration that was self-serving, competitive, and only interested in self-advancement.

Competition for credentials, jobs or income taught by schools at the time were in direct contrast to the boys’ family lives which were grounded in emotional commitment, social ties and collective responsibility for the vulnerable. A similar type of competition in schooling can be seen in Australia today where NAPLAN league tables and HSC league tables are produced and there is much talk about which schools ‘top’ the tables, which schools are ‘losers’ and identifying the most ‘successful’ students.

As a researcher, I was continuously drawn to the fascinating disjuncture between the values and aspiration for the boys coming from their schools and the values of their families, where helping each other and loyalty was paramount. I could also see the difference between the reality and the rhetoric.

As I studied these young men, I became interested in how the boys saw themselves. They liked to ‘fit in’ in’ and be ‘loyal to oneself’. Their ideal world was one where everyone has an ‘equal say in the world’ and where ‘no one is better than anyone else’ or ‘above their station.’ The boys often articulated their desire to disassociate themselves from being classified as aspirational subjects. This often came from the way they saw themselves as working class and their ideas of how males should behave.

Their ideal egalitarian world where everyone can be equal is, as I see it, a falsehood they increasingly buy into as they understand the cards they have been dealt in life and internalize their own future academic failure. I explore more of this thread in my academic paper.

I wish I could say the historic persistence of white working-class underachievement, and the ominous implication of these trends on the long-term life chances, not to mention the ramifications for UK society in general, has led to a growing chorus that something must be done to intervene. However, while there was a Parliamentary Inquiry in 2014, the general response from UK politicians has been simplistic and preachy. Nothing much, in practical terms, has been done.

Of course, working-class underperformance in schooling is symptomatic of larger systemic issues of inequality in the UK. There may be no easy answers or solutions to the problem but what worries me is the great silences. Specifically, how can we improve school quality for white working class boys?

As I see it we need to urgently counteract social and material disadvantage for white working class boys that arises from their disengagement with schooling, not just in the UK but elsewhere in western societies. It is a problem that will affect everyone in the long term, both socially and economically.

Garth Stahl copy

Garth Stahl (@GarthStahl) is a Lecturer in Literacy and Sociology at University of South Australia. He is a theorist of sociology of education. His research interests lie on the nexus of neoliberalism and socio-cultural studies of education, identity, equity/inequality and social change. Currently, his research projects and publications encompass theoretical and empirical studies of learner identities, gender and youth, sociology of schooling in a neoliberal age, gendered subjectivities, equity and difference, and educational reform. Of particular interest to him is exploring counternarratives to neoliberalism around ‘value’ and ‘respectability’ for working-class youth. His book, entitled Identity, Neoliberalism and Aspiration: Educating White Working-class Boys is now available from Routledge.