Management / Leadership
Chapter 6: Interpretation and explanation
Introduction
The intention of the last chapter was to establish descriptive categories and themes from the
words of the participants in the research. In line with my broad adoption of Fairclough’ s (2001)
approach to CDA/CLA I move now from description to interpretation and explanation. Following
Fairclough (2001), I allow for flexibility between these aspects of analysis, having already
discussed the differences and connectedness between interpretation and explanation in Chapter
4. Through interpretation and explanation I bring together the categories and themes established
in Chapter 5 and examine them in light of the theoretical and methodological tools explored in
Chapters 3 and 4.
This chapter builds on my engagement with the following purposes of this thesis:
- to give ‘voice’ to a number of TAs across a small range of educational settings;
- to examine the discourses of my participants for indications of the effect of policy on the shaping of their professional identity, subjectivity and agency;
- to gain insights into where my participants locate themselves in relation to each other and other networks in education;
- to gain insights into how my participants define their roles and how they describe the work they do;
- to identify similarity and variation in the participants’ discourse(s) across a small range of educational settings.
The chapter develops the categories and themes established from the TAs’ words to address the
How is ‘policy’ evident in the discourses, descriptions and discussions of my participants? How
does ‘policy’ shape the subjectivity and agency of my participants? Do other factors than policy
shape the subjectivity and agency of my participants?
Do the participants’ discourses, descriptions and discussions vary between and within sites?
What do the words of the participants reveal about them as knowledgeable subjects and agents,
and about the ‘educational environments’ within which they work? What are the implications of
this?
Is there evidence of the operation of relations of power? What are the implications of these
relations?
Maintaining the centrality of the words of the participants is a key aspect of interpretation and
explanation. Continuing my relativist and constructivist approach, this time through
interpretation and explanation, I take the words of the participants and use them as a framework
for an understanding of their actions, states of being and the knowledge they created or deployed
to give meaning to the social situations in which they found themselves (Bruner, 1990, 1991, in
Bakhurst and Sypnowich 1995). To do this I build on Fairclough’s (2001) idea of MR and Latour’s
(2005) ANT to examine how the participants’ words established commonality and difference
between and across sites, how they ordered, (de)stabilised and calibrated their ongoing
experiences of their working lives, what knowledge this generated, what they created/altered or
sustained, and what remained problematical and contested in their understandings of their
situations. In my explanation I therefore move on to explore some tentative and possible reasons
through referral to the theorists’, writers’ and the participants’ words and explore aspects of
ideologisation as way in which the participants come to terms with, make their way through and
I have interpreted the words of the participants as revealing relationships with several actor-
networks. These networks emerged from the participants’ categorisations of groups of human
agents in different and shifting spatial and temporal relationships. The networks that emerged
were generally based around ‘figurations’ of identifiable agency (Latour, 2005). To recap from
Chapter 5: the networks of teachers, pupils, and TAs tended to be clearly identified figurations
whilst there was the less-well figured network of ‘managers/leaders’ under which category I took
the liberty of subsuming school managers/leaders, national and LA policy makers, as well as
aspects of teachers’ practices that could be considered management / leadership in relation to
the work of the TAs.
An examination of the relationships and connections between the categories established in
Chapter 5 as the participants ‘ordered’ their experiences and thoughts is used to give critical
insights into the overall social situations of the participants. Key throughout this endeavour is
participants’ ‘knowledge’: their knowledge manifested itself in both the taken-for-granted aspects
of their working world as well as in the aspects of that world which they problematised and
struggled over - aspects of their world.
Space and place
Space and place emerged as a significant category across the research sites. I interpret the
instances I cited of the TAs’ persistent, habitual location and action within their schools as
historically and culturally conditioned institutional spaces and places. The habitual location and
action of the TAs (and of teachers and school managers / leaders in placing TAs in those locations)
together with the allied discourse about their actions in different institutional spaces and places
led them to imbue classrooms and teachers with particular significance as axes around which the
differentially role- and status-demarcated spaces within their institutions. This practical and
discursive demarcation of space along with the representations of the actors and actions within
them contributed to the way the TAs ordered and understood their working lives, giving them
some knowledge on how they might successfully conduct themselves.
Differences relating to space and place were evident between the two sectors. Whilst the
secondary TAs demonstrated how habitual re-locations throughout the school day meant that
they could not enter into extended conversation with teachers, the participants from both sectors
generally took for granted the division of space in schools into classrooms and ‘other places’.
Where the primary sector TAs were concerned, their relocation appeared to be less predictable
and more peremptory, potentially changing on a day-to-day basis. Changes of location in both
sectors can be seen to result from historical, embedded and taken-for-granted organisational and
spatial differences (Gramsci, 1974; Billig, 1995) between the two sectors.
One might therefore posit the view that actor-networks of TAs, pupils and teachers form and re-
form according to location within the space of the schools. Within classrooms the actor-network
is a tripartite one of teacher, TA and pupils, with the teacher taking the senior role in teaching and
directing learning. A principally bipartite actor-network is formed between TAs and pupils in
places other than classrooms. Whilst the demarcation of place within schools was discursively
mobilised by the participants, it was not problematized but remained part of the doxa of what a
school is and what happens there.
Two observations need to be made at this point. The first one concerns time. Just as the places
and spaces of school were taken for granted by the participants, so too was the division of the
school day into discrete portions of time. However, time, or rather the lack of it, was discursively
collaborative and cooperative relationships between TAs and teachers either because of the
regular movement of TAs and pupils from classroom to classroom in the secondary sector, or in
the amount of work to be done within apportioned time in the primary sector. Time was also
used as a means to problematise the conditions of employment and pay of TAs in both sectors. In
this regard, one TA (Marj) pointed out that the TAs in her school were paid only for the contact
time with pupils and that this excluded the five-minute transfer time between lessons. It
appeared to be a general feature of the employment of the TAs across both sectors that they
were paid only for the hours they worked. The division of time within schools and the purposes
to which that division was put in relation to the conditions of pay and employment of the TAs
meant that the TAs were effectively ‘excluded’ from schools except when pupils were present.
The second observation relates to immutable mobiles and their use to link the tripartite and
bipartite actor-networks. The TAs’ and pupils’ use of immutable and combinable mobiles in the
form of ‘interventions’, curriculum packages, assessment and achievement data outside
classrooms all represented ways in which the curriculum and its outcomes were exported from
the classroom to the TAs’ places. In this sense, an additional ‘party’ can be added to the tripartite
and bipartite actor-networks. Indeed, following Latour’s approach to actor-networks, the
immutable and combinable mobiles provided connections with management / leadership
networks in the schools and also with the actor-networks of policy makers beyond the schools.
‘Immutable and combinable mobiles’: circulating resources
My proposition of the circulation of resources within and between networks and in physical
spaces, particularly in the form of actual or implied text, led to the identification of instances
where text was (or ceased to be) deployed as a means of affecting relations and practices within
and between the networks, or indeed, of affecting the internal stability of a network. Latour
of linking or decoupling networks and of demonstrating the effect of power through changing a
state of affairs (Latour, 2005). Texts were pivotal in the participants’ descriptions and discussions
of social relations and practices. In this regard, I cited examples of how the withdrawal of texts
from the network of the TAs had led to feelings of insecurity relating to their knowledge of pupils
as well as to their ‘professional’ standing within their schools.
The adoption, creation, circulation and adaptation of texts can be generalised under the term
‘shared knowledge’ in so far as text provided a means for importing and exporting resources from
and to other networks, as well as for mediated and continued circulation within the immediate
network of the TAs, and in assisting the mediation of agency and change. The importation of
knowledge was notable where the policies of ECM and CAF were concerned and of their effects
on individuals, networks and spaces. To return to Eileen for a moment, her mobilisation of ECM,
for example, had the effect of enabling change in routines and of providing a framework for her
own agency. Eileen’s exercise of her agency included the new linking of networks. Whilst there
may appear to be a considerable exercise of autonomy in this example of agency, the overriding
conditioning of agency rests with the immutable mobile of ECM and its determination of the kinds
of agency it facilitates. It is equally important to recognise here the intertexuality of policies since
ECM’s influence on agency and knowledge is supported through its conjunction with the
influences of other immutable mobiles such as the Ofsted Framework for Inspection, or the
documentation attached to the funding process designed to support ECM.
Strong evidence of immutable mobiles and intertextuality as giving a basis for and resulting from
agency, relations and practices emerged from the areas of planning and assessment. Here the
immutable mobiles were curriculum specifications, planning documents, testing regimes and
management of assessment data. The participants drew discursively on these resources to set up,
maintain and/or transgress boundaries between themselves and teachers, to forge links with
other networks such as between departments within school or with external bodies such as public
examination boards, or to align their own institution with similar institutions nationally through,
for example, the ‘school league tables’. The participants’ words demonstrated a taken-for-
granted, unquestioning acceptance of the use of achievement and attainment data through words
such as ‘success’ and ‘the testing proves’, and ‘you know’. In addition, these words expressed
values in terms of the participants’ experiences and relations with teachers and pupils in
maintaining a ‘delivery model’ of education supported by reference to texts imported into and
mediated within their networks. The participants’ expression of experiential and relational values
with regard to the assessment of pupils showed normativising judgements on ‘remediating’
pupils’ deficiencies through demarcations between their pupils and other pupil groups. Referral
to texts to facilitate judgement and remediation of pupils was a means by which the TAs
calibrated and stabilised their work against external ‘objective’ criteria.