Massey Documents by Type

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    Between the teacher and educator: a political analysis of an impossible combination
    (Taylor and Francis Group on behalf of the Australian Teacher Education Association, 2025-05-14) Carusi FT
    This article responds to some of the recent challenges issued to the field of teacher education constituted “between principle, politics, and practice.” By discussing the teacher educator as a tautology, the article analyses education policy and research discourses to illustrate how different politics are generated by the tautological character of the teacher educator’s title. The article concludes with a consideration of the limits of the educational in light of the politics of teacher education that emerges from the analyses.
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    The Picot report and the legitimation of education policy : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Educational Administration at Massey University
    (Massey University, 1990) Wilson, Kenneth James
    This is a study of the formation of an educational policy. It focuses on the use, by the state, of an individual policy document. The study is theoretically located within the framework of policy analysis, a field of study within the sociology of education. It is argued that the state's response to a fiscal crisis exposes its giving of policy priority to the strategies of accumulation and legitimation. The study illuminates the elitist and technocratic policy formation process adopted by the Government for its review of the administration of education. It is argued that the policy and construction of the Picot Report was the means by which the state sought to legitimise its education policies by organising consent for them in civil society. The study applies concepts which come from recent extensions of neo-marxist analyses of the state to the policy formation process to investigate the limits and capacity of the state to act in policy formation. The role of a small goup of state officials in the construction of the discourses and the management of the policy formation process through which the Report was constructed is described. A materialist concept of language is applied to the policy text in order to illuminate the source of the historically specific discourses from which the text was constructed. An account is given of the construction of the Report. It is argued that a policy text is neither value free nor possessed of a single unambiguous meaning. The assertion is tested empirically by interviewing a sample of those involved in the construction of the Picot Report and examining their responses to establish that a variety of readers of a policy text will create a variety of meanings, even at the level of those who constructed the text. In this way the Picot Report is deconstructed and its constituent discourses arc revealed.
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    Close or be closed : to what extent can school closures and mergers be contested and negotiated? : Three New Zealand case studies : Masterton District Network Review 2003, Makoura College closure crisis 2008, Bush District Community Initiated Education Plan 2009 : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Education at Massey University, Palmerston North
    (Massey University, 2013) Hills, Claire
    When faced with school closures and mergers stakeholders have a number of options: they can volunteer to close, they can seek a merger with a suitable partner, they can seek a stay of action by seeking more time, they can invest effort in negotiating an alternative outcome or they can resist closure by fighting to survive as a stand-alone school. Organised individual school and/or community protests are other options that may be used. This thesis explores the contestability of school closures and mergers in post Tomorrow’s Schools rural New Zealand contexts in both the primary and secondary sectors. The three case studies selected are the Masterton District Network Review 2003, the Makoura College closure decision 2008 and the Bush District Initiated Education Plan 2009. This thesis will show that the school closure/merger process can sometimes be successfully contested by politicised and determined educational communities. If and when the level of community concern reaches the level of community wide outrage, then politicians may decide to back down. In the Masterton District Review 2003 some schools were more successful than others in contesting mergers and closures. The reasons will be explored. Community resistance was crucial in overturning the Makoura College closure decision in 2008. The Community Initiated Education Plan policy trialled in the Bush District in 2009 resulted in a victory for the stakeholders throughout the region who actively contested the proposals and won. The research literature in New Zealand, and overseas, shows that school closures and mergers can be expected to cause significant community culture shock. Stakeholders discover that they have a deep emotional attachment to their schools. They usually close ranks as its guardians to defend the Taonga (cultural treasure) and social capital that their school represents. In this process distinct patterns of response emerge. Anger and grief are expressed in on-going outbursts of emotive language. Parents assert their ‘right’ to choose the most suitable school for their child conferred by Tomorrow’s Schools and demand clear and transparent communication from the Ministry of Education and to be fully consulted during the process. There is a clear pattern of communication breakdown between the Ministry and local stakeholders. This can be seen in community meetings, protest marches, petitions, contentious debates about transport issues, racism, white flight, demographics, economics, the virtues of smaller schools versus larger schools and the destruction of core communities. The conflict in values leads to community infighting and conflict between schools and with the Ministry and the Minister of Education. After school mergers, stakeholders face the often unwelcome task letting go of the past and engaging in the on-going challenge of creating a new culture where the unconscious taken for granted beliefs and values which had provided the cultural glue for the merging schools must be revisited until a new culture develops which is accepted by the new school community as appropriate to its needs. In the aftermath of school closures abandoned buildings, trapped in prolonged disposal processes, become environmental eyesores in their communities as they slowly succumb to vandalism and arson.
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    Mind the gap! : policy change in practice : school qualifications reform in New Zealand, 1980-2002 : 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, 2007) Alison, Judie
    'Policy gaps' in education mean that the visions of policy-makers frequently fail to materialise fully, or at all, in teacher practice. This thesis argues that a significant 'policy gap' developed in New Zealand around school qualifications policy during the 1990's, and puts forward some explanations for that. A significant shift in government discourses over that period, from largely social democratic to predominantly neo-liberal discourses, was not matched by a similar shift in the discourses of teachers or the union that represents them. During the same period, teachers and their representative bodies were excluded from policy development, reflecting this shift in government discourses. Government and teachers were 'talking past each other'. As a result, qualifications reforms that might have been expected to be generally welcomed by the profession, as a government response to calls from the profession over many decades, were instead rejected by the majority of teachers. Furthermore, the absence of the teacher voice from policy development meant that the shape of the reforms moved significantly away from the profession's original vision, a further reason for its unacceptability to teachers. Reform was only able to be achieved when teachers and their union were brought back into the policy-making and policy-communicating processes and a version of standards-based assessment closer to the union's original vision was adopted by government. Nevertheless, the National Certificate of Educational Achievement that resulted appears to still be perceived by teachers as externally imposed and its origins in the profession's advocacy for reform over many years have been lost. This indicates that 'policy gaps', while easily opened, are not as easily closed.
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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.