Browsing by Author "O'Neill, John"

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    A genealogical examination of curriculum-assessment as governmentality in Aotearoa New Zealand : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Education at Massey University, Manawatū Campus New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2020) O'Neill, Anne-Marie
    This doctoral thesis with four publications examines the implementation of curriculum and assessment, as globally-driven standards-based reform (SBR) in Aotearoa New Zealand (ANZ). Drawing on Michel Foucault’s ‘toolbox’ and his genealogical methodology, it traces and contextualises the discursive basis of curriculum-assessment as neoliberal governmentality policies. From 1989, a policy chronology spanning three governments, analyses how governmentality inserts economics into the management of people, society and governance. As a rationalisation regime, curriculum-assessment facilitated economic efficiencies and the achievement of official objectives by enabling ‘things’, people and the future to be steered in certain ways. Governmentality policies also nurture the making of particular kinds of people who will to support official objectives. Comprising four key chapters, the thesis details the discursive ‘beginnings’ and emergence of an assessment-driven curriculum intended to boost ANZ’s global competitiveness. The failure of teacher-implemented national standards to produce reliable measurement by 1999, enabled the implementation of highly interventionist policies during the 2000s. A standardised curriculum and data-driven teaching strengthened schools as centres of calculation. The genealogy then examines two curriculum programmes designed to increase achievement and make people more self-governing and responsible. A school-parent literacy partnership (2004) taught parent-teachers to boost children’s learning through home activities. Similarly, assessment change through National Standards (2011) nurtured responsible, future-focused and calculative learners and parents. Increasing the educational outcomes of the population was part of increasing its overall health, welfare and productivity. The study illustrates how personal responsibility is now the main technique for developing more enterprising, self-governing and calculative individuals under governmentality. These biopolitical programmes, nurture desire in people to ‘freely’ re-make their bodies, skills, aspirations, emotions and living practices aligned to preferred models of the individual, culture and social relations. This involves re-moralising one’s inner life, and changing relationships with selves, families and the state. The study maps how governmentality commodifies and economises bodies and minds in the service of economic government. It confirms the usefulness of genealogically examining governmentality through this deeper, multidimensional lens and its ‘interpretative analytics’. This approach enables the uncovering of the politico-economic and cultural-socio purposes of education policy under neoliberalism.
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    Shards of teacher and curriculum development in four New Zealand secondary schools : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Education at Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand
    (Massey University. Department of Social and Policy Studies in Education, 2001) O'Neill, John
    This study examines teacher and curriculum development in the period of intense curriculum policy reform of the mid-1990s. It is based largely on interviews conducted with teachers in four New Zealand secondary schools. It documents and analyses the thinking and strategising that informed their attempts as teachers and curriculum leaders to develop their individual and collective practice and respond to external demands for change. The accounts are contextualised within the history, politics and culture of New Zealand secondary schooling since the Thomas Report on the Post-Primary school Curriculum in 1943, and parallel developments in secondary schooling in other anglophone countries.The study attempts to understand the workgroup, organisational and systemic constraints within which secondary school teachers conduct their work and how they seek to exercise their individual and collective agency in order to gain more control and knowledge of their occupational circumstances. The study links contemporary dilemmas of practice to longer standing, embedded tensions of curriculum content, pedagogy and assessment. It identifies continuities and discontinuities of secondary schooling practice in the decades since the 1940s and shows how contemporary policy options and proposed solutions are simply the latest staging post in a protracted sequence of political efforts to solve 'problems' of curriculum and credentialing. In some respects, the official policy texts introduced in the 1990s spoke directly to teachers, own pragmatic concerns and aspirations. Thus, in this study, teachers and curriculum leaders engaged creatively and energetically with the challenges posed by school-based Unit Standards trials because they appeared to offer the opportunity to end secondary teachers' long search for meaningful alternatives to examination dominated schemes of work, assessments and credentials. However, curriculum innovation always took place alongside other day-to-day routines and seasonal patterns of work. For curriculum leaders in this study, these multiple demands meant that any potential benefits of voluntary curriculum innovation had constantly to be weighed against its costs in terms of other workgroup priorities, the energies and dispositions of fellow workgroup members and their personal health and well-being.