Translating New Pedagogical Knowledges Into School Redesign: Making “Thinking Outside the Box” a Practical Reality

• In Event: Spatialized Pedagogies, Innovative Learning Environments, and School Redesign: Researchers, Teachers, and Students Coproducing Knowledge

Abstract

The paper is based on the notion that school change is an ecology of interrelated purposes, processes and practices (authors) which must have pedagogical change at the centre. It mobilises notions of school change as redesign (author and other).
The Creative School Change research project (funded by Arts Council England) investigated the ways in which 40 schools understood and undertook classroom and school change centred on creative learning. Schools were nominated by regional CP organizations, and 12 researcher days in each site generated a range of interview, observational, image and documentary data from school leadership teams, teachers, creative practitioners, students, parents and community members. From this initial ‘snapshot’ the team of six researchers selected twelve schools for ongoing case study over two school years (18 days across a further three visits). All sites were visited by two researchers, all data was thematically coded by the pair and a seventh ‘desk researcher’ moderating across the data corpus; all school data was subject to whole-team cross-case analysis/debate. This paper uses analysis from both phases.

Across the schools the term ’thinking outside the box’ was ubiquitous. This was shorthand for growing staff awareness of the need to move beyond egg-crate classrooms, rigid timetables, demarcated subjects, linear notions of progression with narrowly defined targets, discrete school boundaries and school days. All schools experimented with teaching across subjects inside and outside the classroom, combining staff and subjects in new ways. More experiential and exploratory pedagogies frequently led to new approaches to internal classroom arrangements. Many schools (n=26) knocked down walls, developed outside-learning areas, used corridors, halls and gymnasia in different ways, redesigned timetables and staffing structures. Some (n= 5) were building new schools and the designs incorporated ‘more open’ pedagogical understandings. A few schools (n=9) did not have classroom change at the heart of their reforms and did not engage in ‘border/barrier’ breaking changes. But change in many schools (n= 23) was limited to pockets of innovation; reform was delimited by senior leadership teams which were not prepared to redesign top-down practices.

On this basis, we argue that:
(1) school redesign is dependent on deep teacher understandings of new pedagogical possibilities
(2) making these possibilities into realities is limited if there are not accompanying changes to the spatial, temporal, social, material, governance, symbolic and aesthetic modalities of the school


The paper offers a grounded theorization of school redesign which centres on pedagogical change and teacher knowledge-building; it shows the opportunities and challenges when making this new knowledge practical. It speaks to school change literatures which focus primarily on leadership and school capacity building but do not attend to accompanying changes in other modalities of school operation.

Author

• Patricia Lorna Thomson, University of Nottingham