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Article Excerpt
In this paper we show that poor student performance in a rural school is influenced by the classifications used for student learning and behaviour. We propose that the institution's organisation is conveyed via a classification schema that permeates and informs judgments about student progress and holds sway over teacher cognition. Category boundaries are set and differentiate between compliant and non-compliant students in the school in question. Conformity to expectations by compliant students can be mistaken for academic security. Rectifying disruptive and off-task behaviours can replace teaching of the non-compliant students. Institutional categories used to judge and label performances remain difficult to counter in that they are part of the reality of everyday interaction and given credence in departmental policy and professional discourse.
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Schools as classifying institutions
Can the organisation within an institution affect rates of learning and poor student performance in a rural primary school? Our approach to this question is to see institutions as exerting a strong, but under-analysed, influence over the cognition of their members. According to Mary Douglas (1986), institutions 'do much of our thinking for us' as they hold the ready-made classifications needed to communicate. Simply stated, communication is a substantial element of teaching and learning.
Teachers and students are, to a degree, free to choose how they will communicate, but to do so they must use sets of pre-established classifications. A group or an institution, for example, holds and carries forward previously conceived forms of thought and labels for things, duties, responsibilities, a division of labour and rituals that inform present, everyday interactions.
A child makes meaning from the classifications used in a family, just as teachers take their cues from a school's classification schema that also predates them. A second, not always acted on, aspect of face-to-face interaction and communication is that situated meaning and ecological validity are derived from factors both internal and external to the situation and the interaction itself (Barker, 1968; Bourdieu, 1993; Cicourel, 1964; Goffman, 1961). A mother emphasising good manners to a child is also enacting social expectations of a social category of 'good parenting'. As teachers point out rules and criteria for acceptable schoolwork, they too activate pre-established categories from an education department and professional standards.
Social control over the cognition of members of institutions comes from the inside and from the outside. 'Control' does not rule out conflict, resistance, compliance, rebellion or fights, which are ongoing facts of institutional life. Control occurs through classification schema that permeate everyday common sense, as categories in use shape thinking and judgments made about oneself and others. Institutions make labels and the labels construct different kinds of people according to the categories in use (Douglas, 1986, p. 112).
While institutions control the classification schema, there is still no certainty as to how categories will be received and acted on. Douglas (1986, p. 98) suggests Durkheim shows there can be a 'good fit' and a 'bad fit between public and private classifications'; individuals can reject the judgments of others, or feel incapable of meeting public expectations, or not act on classifications at all when the classifications are incoherent or do not make sense to them. Institutional control and strategy for working within institutions is played out within these limits. The object of these opening paragraphs has been to outline the theoretical parameters of our study based in a rural town, but can be applied to schools in general.
We wish to apply an institutional view to the study of education and schooling. In purely functional terms, teachers should, through their professional training, have the proficiency to guide students academically towards the 'right' thing to do and away from inappropriate alternatives. Ensuring students become more competent learners as they meet expectations is a required educational service. Not all students, parents or teachers do, however, share a school's definition of an educational situation. Schools, as institutions, are thus organised so that teachers are not cut off as isolated individuals. Set curricula, report cards, behaviour policies, and so on act as a shared schema to classify daily activities (usually in dichotomies; right/wrong, tolerated/not tolerated). As they do, and must, apply these classifications, teachers come to perceive students and form opinions on the merits of their performance of school work; and develop strategies for working with them in class and in their general planning ('a pleasure to have in my class', 'needs more work on word attack skills', 'daydreams', 'parent should read more to them at home'). These perceptions underpin relationships through which teachers come to understand how students respond to their teaching, drift away from it, or are difficult to make progress with.
We argue, from a preliminary analysis of 33 student files, that there are tendencies for a school to equate good academic performance with classroom compliance, and to overlook learning potential as off-task behaviour increases. Such locked-in definitions of the situation (Thomas, 1923) can be, in all probability are, accepted as an inevitable consequence of teaching in rural schools. But beyond this, an alternative question is to what degree can unquestioned schemes for classifying students play hidden and unexamined parts in reproducing poor academic performances in rural and urban schools? Finally, what alternatives can the profession, and the groups who supply the current words in use, offer in conditions where professional categories have the opposite of their desired effect; where learning and development are slowed down rather than enhanced?
Our argument is developed across three sections. The aims of the study, the background...
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