Education is a surprising business. It seems benign, even bland – the daily routine in classrooms, the lesson preparation and marking for teachers. But beneath that surface, powerful and complicated dynamics of privilege and exclusion are at work.
My research on education has mainly concerned social justice issues, and the education system itself – a massive and potent social institution, constantly in change. Education is, fundamentally, about creating capacities for practice, capacities that are both individual and social. In the course of this, some people are dealt advantage and others are dealt disadvantage. That used to be deliberate, and quite open: school systems were born segregated, by class, gender and race. It’s now more covert, and happens through curriculum making, testing, funding and selection. But it still happens.
My first educational research was my PhD thesis, on the development of children’s political ideas (published as The Child’s Construction of Politics). This was undoubtedly the funniest research project I have done, but also sinister in showing the prevalence of fear, then directed at foreigners, war and communism. Overlapping with this, I was involved with a number of other researchers in a large study of Sydney teenagers (published as 12 to 20.) This quantitative work gave me evidence for the pervasive social class effects in education, and a feel for its complexities.
I then joined with Dean Ashenden, Sandra Kessler and Gary Dowsett in a close-focus study of how educational inequality worked, in everyday school processes. We interviewed students aged about 14, their parents (usually at their home), their teachers, and their principals – individually, conversationally, and in detail, 424 in all. The result was an extraordinarily rich body of information, which took us years to analyze, working case by case.
I still remember the 40 minutes I spent in a leather chair in a well-appointed office, listening to the principal of an elite private school giving me a stunning run-down of the corporate hierarchy, housing trends, cultural divisions, families and factions of an Australian city’s ruling class. I could have published it in a sociology journal without changing a word. But I also remember talks with working-class mothers and fathers in fibro cottages on the same city’s outskirts. They knew as much, but about different things.
This project turned into two books, more than a dozen articles, a video, endless conference presentations and workshops with teachers and parents. It was the most intense research collaboration in my career, and the four of us remain friends, nearly thirty years after Making the Difference was published.Because Making the Difference and its sequel Teachers’ Work included mainstream working-class schools, I got an undeserved reputation as knowing about poverty. So I was commissioned to do a national study of the Disadvantaged Schools Programme, to help a re-thinking of this very creative enterprise. I worked intensively on this with Viv White and Ken Johnston, and in quick time we put together a portfolio of studies including surveys of teachers, oral history, school case studies, conceptual work and policy proposals.
But in the late 1980s the DSP, and its mother institution the Australian Schools Commission, were under attack by neoliberals. Our lovely project reports were filed-and-forgotten by the economists who now controlled education policy in Canberra. Deakin University came to the rescue and published them as Running Twice as Hard, masquerading as an education policy case study.
I kept thinking about the issues, and a couple of years later, on the invitation of the Canadian journal Our Schools Ourselves, published a little book called Schools and Social Justice. This pulled together some of the DSP findings and offered some new thinking about ‘curricular justice’. But the Australian publisher of this book soon went broke, so it was never reprinted and had little impact locally. Curiously my paper in a mainstream US educational journal that presented the line of thought was reprinted four times overseas, once in translation.
By now I also had a lot of experience with gender research (see Gender). The Making the Difference project had fascinating material on gender relations in families, schools and adolescent life. We wrote several articles about this, and a splendidly-illustrated booklet called Ockers and Disco-maniacs. In the late 1980s I had done a life-history project on masculinity that yielded a good deal of retrospective material about experiences of school. I was therefore in a good position to be an expert on boys’ education, just when this was becoming a public issue.
I did write a number of papers about this, showing how schools constructed multiple masculinities, through curriculum differences, discipline, sports and peer group life, and had to negotiate the relations between them. Unfortunately this wasn’t the simple anti-feminist message the media wanted to hear, in the days of the ‘What About the Boys?’ backlash, so I missed my chance for world fame.
At the turn of the new century, I had a job as professor of education and became involved, with Steve Crump and colleagues from the school system, in a study of new vocational education courses in senior high school. This led back to my old interest in working-class families’ relationships with education, and a new round of interviews that explored the dilemmas created for parents by the changing school system and labour market.
This project, together with research by my doctoral students, and my involvement with colleagues in writing a textbook on social dimensions of education, revived my interest in issues about teachers. Teachers’ work was now being re-shaped by accreditation and auditing regimes, locally and internationally. I have always valued my connection with school teachers - it helps keep me balanced, as an academic – and I wanted to make a return in the new circumstances.
So I convened a very lively series of seminars at the University of Sydney on the theme of ‘the good teacher’, with visiting speakers as well as our own talent. I shamelessly borrowed from the contributors’ ideas in writing a report on the subject. But I haven’t yet been able to develop a research or action agenda out of this, as I had hoped to do.
SELECTION OF TEN
SELECTION OF TEN
Connell, Raewyn. 2009. Good teachers on dangerous ground: towards a new view of teacher quality and professionalism. Critical Studies in Education, vol. 50 no. 3, 213-229.
Newly powerful accreditation bodies, and massive testing programmes, are changing the official definition of a good teacher. This paper looks back at the history of teaching and forward to non-neoliberal ways of thinking about ‘quality’ in teaching.
Connell, Raewyn, Craig Campbell, Margaret Vickers, Anthony Welch, Dennis Foley and Nigel Bagnall. 2007. Education, Change & Society. Sydney, Oxford University Press. Second edition, revised, 2010.
Yes, a textbook! But we think a pretty good one. My chapters are about growing up, about teachers, and about the nature of science.
Connell, Raewyn. 2003. Working-class families and the new secondary education. Australian Journal of Education, vol. 47 no. 3, 237-252.
During a project on new vocational curricula in NSW high schools, we interviewed parents, students and teachers. Our discussions with rural and urban working-class families traced an uncertain yet vital relationship with the school system in the upper secondary years.
Connell, Raewyn. 1996. Teaching the boys: new research on masculinity, and gender strategies for schools. Teachers College Record, vol. 98 no. 2, 206-235.
Gender research opened questions about how masculinities are made in the course of growing up. This paper brought together what was known about this process, from social research in several countries, to work out its implications for schools.
Connell, Raewyn. 1994. Poverty and education. Harvard Educational Review, vol. 64 no. 2, 125-149.
This paper brought together Australian, US and UK experience with compensatory education programmes, and argued for an approach to educational inequality that highlighted curriculum, and contested privilege as well as disadvantage. It was courteously published by the Harvard education school.
Connell, Raewyn. 1993. Schools and Social Justice. Toronto, Our Schools Ourselves; Sydney, Pluto Press; Philadelphia, Temple University Press.
Based mainly on our research with the Disadvantaged Schools Programme, which is described in some detail, this book also proposed a theory of ‘curricular justice’ that would put social justice at the heart of education rather than leaving it as an optional extra.
Connell, Raewyn. How to supervise a PhD. Vestes: Australian Universities Review, 1985, vol. 28 no. 2, 38-41.
My most reprinted article! Australian universities were enrolling increasing numbers of research students, but often left them to sink or swim. I argued, from practical experience, that PhD supervision was a demanding form of teaching needing reflection as well as care and enthusiasm.
Connell, Raewyn. 1985. Teachers' Work. Sydney, Allen & Unwin.
The second book from the ‘Making the Difference’ project. We had marvellous interviews with teachers, providing a basis for thinking about their lives and careers, and the nature of their work and workplace. A kind of industrial sociology that located teachers at the centre of major issues about education.
Connell, Raewyn, Dean Ashenden, Sandra Kessler and Gary Dowsett. 1982. Making the Difference: Schools, Families and Social Division. Sydney, Allen & Unwin.
The main publication from an immensely productive research project. It described families’ educational projects, gender in schools, class differences in educational experience, curriculum, schools as institutions, and strategies for democratising the school system. An academic best-seller in Australia, and read a little overseas.
Connell, Raewyn. 1974. Anti-Pygmalion: reflections on some experiments in reforming universities. International Social Science Journal, vol. 26, 483-497.
A look at the student movement of the 1960s, the Free University in Sydney, and attempts to democratise the mainstream universities, from an activist point of view.
Newly powerful accreditation bodies, and massive testing programmes, are changing the official definition of a good teacher. This paper looks back at the history of teaching and forward to non-neoliberal ways of thinking about ‘quality’ in teaching.
Connell, Raewyn, Craig Campbell, Margaret Vickers, Anthony Welch, Dennis Foley and Nigel Bagnall. 2007. Education, Change & Society. Sydney, Oxford University Press. Second edition, revised, 2010.
Yes, a textbook! But we think a pretty good one. My chapters are about growing up, about teachers, and about the nature of science.
Connell, Raewyn. 2003. Working-class families and the new secondary education. Australian Journal of Education, vol. 47 no. 3, 237-252.
During a project on new vocational curricula in NSW high schools, we interviewed parents, students and teachers. Our discussions with rural and urban working-class families traced an uncertain yet vital relationship with the school system in the upper secondary years.
Connell, Raewyn. 1996. Teaching the boys: new research on masculinity, and gender strategies for schools. Teachers College Record, vol. 98 no. 2, 206-235.
Gender research opened questions about how masculinities are made in the course of growing up. This paper brought together what was known about this process, from social research in several countries, to work out its implications for schools.
Connell, Raewyn. 1994. Poverty and education. Harvard Educational Review, vol. 64 no. 2, 125-149.
This paper brought together Australian, US and UK experience with compensatory education programmes, and argued for an approach to educational inequality that highlighted curriculum, and contested privilege as well as disadvantage. It was courteously published by the Harvard education school.
Connell, Raewyn. 1993. Schools and Social Justice. Toronto, Our Schools Ourselves; Sydney, Pluto Press; Philadelphia, Temple University Press.
Based mainly on our research with the Disadvantaged Schools Programme, which is described in some detail, this book also proposed a theory of ‘curricular justice’ that would put social justice at the heart of education rather than leaving it as an optional extra.
Connell, Raewyn. How to supervise a PhD. Vestes: Australian Universities Review, 1985, vol. 28 no. 2, 38-41.
My most reprinted article! Australian universities were enrolling increasing numbers of research students, but often left them to sink or swim. I argued, from practical experience, that PhD supervision was a demanding form of teaching needing reflection as well as care and enthusiasm.
Connell, Raewyn. 1985. Teachers' Work. Sydney, Allen & Unwin.
The second book from the ‘Making the Difference’ project. We had marvellous interviews with teachers, providing a basis for thinking about their lives and careers, and the nature of their work and workplace. A kind of industrial sociology that located teachers at the centre of major issues about education.
Connell, Raewyn, Dean Ashenden, Sandra Kessler and Gary Dowsett. 1982. Making the Difference: Schools, Families and Social Division. Sydney, Allen & Unwin.
The main publication from an immensely productive research project. It described families’ educational projects, gender in schools, class differences in educational experience, curriculum, schools as institutions, and strategies for democratising the school system. An academic best-seller in Australia, and read a little overseas.
Connell, Raewyn. 1974. Anti-Pygmalion: reflections on some experiments in reforming universities. International Social Science Journal, vol. 26, 483-497.
A look at the student movement of the 1960s, the Free University in Sydney, and attempts to democratise the mainstream universities, from an activist point of view.
