Chapter 1: Teachers and Curriculum Change: Working to Get it Right

This chapter is about looking at teachers’ experience of curriculum development through a psychoanalytic lens. I begin the chapter by setting the scene in England, where teachers are subject to a constant stream of initiatives. In a theoretical interlude, I describe the theoretical “lens” in more detail, questioning the technical–rationalist frameworks customarily employed to consider innovation. The concerns of mathematics educators are set out following this showing, illustrating the shift into paradigms outside of a technical–rationalist model, and finally, I read a set of data using the psychoanalytic framework as a guide, in order to re-think the experience of teachers undergoing change.

As education in England has become focused increasingly on measurement and centralized control, the interests and concerns of individual teachers have become marginalized by the discourses of achievement and economic viability. There is an emphasis on certainty and a rationality of a kind that regards learning as linear and easy to insert into the developmental pathways of pupils. Documentation associated with curriculum advice suggests that these pathways are predictable, incremental, and measurable. While the performance of pupils remains in the spotlight of curriculum intervention, perspectives relating to teacher development are subject to similar influences, whereby ongoing performance is to be managed and developed along prescribed routes. In England, there is a concerted move to create a framework of competences with clear descriptors of progressive levels of ability and ways to improve that are to be applied to practicing teachers. Much of this improvement lies in the development of “meta-cognitive skills,” which are presumed to underpin improvements to practice, that is, an assumption that teachers respond to the teaching task primarily by “thinking it through,” cognitively. In this way, performance-oriented routes to professional development tend to bypass the immediate concerns of individuals, and success or failure tends to be compartmentalized into certain categories in which “remedies” might be applied and, potentially, notable improvements made.

All disciplines in education can be thought of as tied into sets of binaries in which outside intervention is frequently tilted against the preferences of the individual. Mathematics education is no exception. The language in which these initiatives are embedded walks an unsteady line between an agenda that nominally supports increased teacher autonomy and one which overtly privileges standards and outputs with ever-increasing levels of accountability. However, teachers continue to value the former, although the spaces where this can be expressed have become scarcer. For many newly qualified teachers (NQTs), keen to be viewed as competent, a perceived route to being a successful teacher lies in a close identification with the governmental advice; in such an approach, personal attributes may add a surface sparkle to prescribed approaches.

Continuing government intervention into teaching practices and curriculum “produces” teachers as practitioners who are apparently fated to perform in deficit. Although the newly devised curriculum model is “applied,” the practices of teachers appear to be conflated with curriculum recommendations when there is a failure to increase levels of achievement in line with predictions. There are a number of proffered explanations for “teacher failure.” Fullan (2003) writes about the perceived muted enthusiasm of teachers toward innovation and the associated assessment instruments developed to record student performance. In relation to this dilemma, Fullan writes, “as scores rose, the morale of teachers and principals, if anything declined” (p. 3). He goes on to say, “Engaged students, energetic and committed teachers, improvements in problem-solving and thinking skills, greater emotional intelligence, and, generally, teaching and learning for deeper understanding cannot be orchestrated from the center” (p. 3). In this extended list, there can be discerned a shift from the more familiar technical rationalist agenda associated with curriculum innovation, toward rather more nebulous and altruistic features that carry personal appeal. The list here works to fix an implicitly unfinished list of qualities, which, amongst my colleagues, might be regarded as the “fairy dust” of teaching, that is, something inherently “more than” documents can convey, which relies on an emotional response, rather than a response more closely associated with methods. Overall, there is an acknowledgement that teachers’ engagement with their task cannot be neatly boxed into incremental stages toward mastery of the latest innovation “orchestrated from the center.” Not everything can be managed from “the outside–in.”

I begin here with a rather playful/serious move to align curriculum reform with what might be described as the collective fantasies of curriculum reformers. For those of us who are both observers and participants in curriculum reform, it appears that the resolution to all the perceived difficulties involved in improving things, now specifically related to raising measurable achievement, appears to be not quite graspable in the moment. In England, the Department for Children, Families and Schools (DCFS, and its earlier manifestations, e.g., DfEE) has been responsible for over 1,600 documents issued since the year 2000. While these documents are not confined to curriculum recommendations, they offer an indication that there is a concerted search for a more effective education system, even if applied in small, incremental stages, in the main (Ball, 2008). Yet the continuing proliferation of documentation also implies that solutions to difficulties appear to remain as elusive as ever. Ball (2008) goes on to say that, while the relationship between policy and practice is complex—that is, “Policies are contested, interpreted and enacted . . . and meanings of policy makers do not always translate directly and obviously into institutional practices”—it is important not to “over-estimate the logical rationality of policy. Policy strategies, acts, guidelines and initiatives are often messy, contradictory, confused and unclear” (p. 7). Logical rationality, then, has an untidy underbelly, which is shaped discursively into something apparently manageable by the determining orchestrations “at the center,” but much more difficult to realize in situ (Coffield et al., 2007).

In describing the tensions that exist for teachers between the “economies of performance” and “ecologies of practice” (p. 131), Stronach et al. (2002) draw attention to the notional boundary between the outside–in and inside–out dynamic. Teachers understand that students have varying inclinations, abilities, and commitment to learning, and they see these difficulties smoothed out by a curriculum that assumes a readiness amongst pupils to learn, in both cognitive and affective terms. Although it is recognized that there will be some variation, there is an implicit assumption in the available curriculum advice that students will learn along the pathways prescribed and at a pace determined by the curriculum content. However, the relationship between “inside” and “outside” is not so easily drawn. Psychoanalysis fudges the boundary between self and context—society and its requirements—so that neither is a distinct entity in relation to the other. Permeating this contested area for the individual, is the Imaginary. A theoretical feint is called for here.