Structuration: an Empirical Analysis of Teachers in Comprehensive Schools

Abstract

A theoretical model for the development and testing of research issues in the comprehensive school is proposed. It draws upon the work of Giddens (structuration hypothesis) and Knorr-Cetina (representation hypothesis) in an attempt to assess an appropriate way of understanding how teachers with different posts in school draw upon the structuring properties of the school to achieve their objectives in the daily episodes of situated interaction. Ethnography is selected as the relevant methodological technique because it permits a sequential and flexible approach to fieldwork. Theory may be both developed and tested in the course of the study. Triangulation, the collaboration of evidence from several sources, and reactive analysis, the adoption during the fieldwork of particular criteria or tests to examine the evidence, are used to search for the substantiation of emerging issues. The fieldwork was conducted in two comprehensive schools. The issues that emerged substantiated in both schools in the course of this study were: (a) Traditional headteacher authority is perceived by staff as having been delegated, due to school size, to administrative staff (from deputy-heads to year tutors). A supervisory staff career ladder was thus formed and daily maintained by human agency in episodes of situated interaction. (b) Subject classroom staff and the heads of subjects perceived themselves and the job they were doing, as undervalued. Lack of consultation, lack of access to information, lack of support services and poor working conditions, combined to reduce their status and leave their efforts unacknowledged. Speculative unintended consequences and recommendations are proposed.