Grammar Of Schooling Research Articles

Artificial Intelligence and Education: End the Grammar of Schooling

Purpose The purpose is to stimulate imagination of artificial intelligence (AI) and education beyond current schooling. Design/Approach/Methods The approach this article took is a broad review of literature on learning, teaching, schooling, and technological development and evidence-based reasoning about the possible future of education in the context of AI. Findings Schools could be transformed with the advancement of technology, especially generative AI. The changes should start with student-driven personalizing learning and problem-oriented pedagogy. Originality/Value The value of the article lies with the unique definitions of personalized learning and problem-oriented pedagogy as well as the contribution of AI to support a new form of learning.

Embodied and Enactive Creativity: Moving Beyond the Mind–Body Dichotomy in School Education

ABSTRACTThis study explores the ways in which embodied creativity is conceived and implemented in french schools through the study of a corpus of professional articles published since the 1960s in a journal dedicated to physical education. The analysis focuses on pedagogical experiments to foster bodily creativity carried out in primary schools, as part of a wide‐ranging educational reform during the 1970s. Those practices mark a radical break with the grammar of schooling whose worldwide spread is linked to the colonial expansion of western Europe. They revealed many similarities with indigenous pedagogies through the willingness to go beyond the mind–body dichotomy, to value a sensitive and intuitive body, to anchor knowledge in lived experience and to move from a top‐down relationship between teacher and pupil to a more horizontal one. The 1980s marked a return to more traditional methods, but these pedagogical experiments nurtured a conception of embodied and enactive creativity that sought to go beyond a western vision of the body, of action and of the relationship with the world in school education. The convergences with non‐western pedagogies underline the interest of these approaches to explore and foster embodied and enactive creativity.

Boxed in: Structural limitations to flexible pacing in Michigan competency-based education pilot districts

Over the last decade, policymakers have been experimenting with competency-based education, an instructional reform that relies on flexible pacing to enable students to achieve content mastery at their own pace. In this paper, we draw on mixed-methods data from teacher surveys and interviews to examine the use of flexible instructional pacing in five Michigan school districts implementing competency-based education. While implementing flexible pacing was challenging for all five districts, we identified several promising practices that facilitated flexible pacing in their districts. These included the adoption of school-wide interventions and the ability of teachers to share students across classrooms. These practices resulted from explicit prioritization of flexible pacing in some districts, whereas in others, they occurred somewhat by happenstance. In all cases, structural challenges (e.g., the division of time and space and the allocation of students to individual classrooms) inherent in “the grammar of schooling” impeded some or all efforts to implement flexible pacing. It will be essential to tackle these structural challenges to flexible pacing in future efforts to implement competency-based education reforms.

Building and programming a weather station: Teachers’ views on values and challenges in a comprehensive STEM project

ABSTRACT Background Integrated STEM approaches are acknowledged as important for making school subjects relevant and engaging for students and are reinforced with the current emphasis on computational thinking. Still, such approaches are rarely realized in schools. This study investigates how the traditional ‘grammar of schooling’ may prevent realization of more holistic teaching in line with ideas from integrated STEM. Purpose A concrete teaching project where students design, program and build their own weather station is presented, and we investigate the values and challenges teachers see in the project and the obstacles that may prevent them from running it in class. This way it throws light on why STEM approaches may be difficult to realize in schools. Sample The sample consists of teachers involved in a collaborative project in which Project Weather Station was developed, including the teacher who was undertaking the project in his grade 9 class. Design and methods The study follows a case study design, with group interviews with teachers. Observation in class, video recording and interviews with students form a backdrop of the main interview data. Results Results show that teachers see value in the weather station project in line with the overarching aims of the curriculum and consistent with STEM ideas. Challenges they see are related to own competence, time use, risk of failure and logistics across subjects. Conclusion It is concluded that teachers’ challenges reflect a tension between overarching aims in education and the more specific competence aims in the curriculum. On a systemic level there is therefore a need for an acceptance for the value of teaching that targets overarching aims of education. It is important to acknowledge teachers’ challenges and fulfil their needs for support when undertaking extensive projects that have potential for realising the more holistic aims of education typical for STEM projects.

ABSORBED BY EVERYDAY LIFE – STUDENTS’ EXPERIENCE OF THE CHANGING GRAMMAR OF SCHOOLING DURING THE CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC

This paper reports the findings of the study of selected elements of grammar of schooling (temporal and spatial organization, learning interactions). The study presented in this article focuses on the experiences of 64 1st year pedagogy students’ who had learned in the coronavirus pandemic. The data were collected through questionnaire with open-ended questions about the changes students experienced due to the coronavirus pandemic in areas such as the organisation of space, the organisation of time, learning interactions, forms of work, as well as the expected consequences of the changes they are currently witnessing and the anticipated ‘return to normality’. The article presents the findings related to changes in three elements of the grammar of schooling: (1) spatial organization; (2) temporal organization; and (3) educational interactions. The results of the study indicate that students had to reorganize their space-time due to receiving the educational process from home. Students feel swallowed up by everyday life – the educational process has become one of many routine daily activities. They experience a changein privacy boundaries, which has consequences for other family members as well. Students’ relationships with teacher educators are still formal and centered around the content being taught. Relationships with peers have weakened considerably.

Owning educational change in Korean schools: three driving forces behind sustainable change.

In this essay, we discuss how the COVID-19 pandemic drove key changes in schooling and what forces can sustain these changes. Responding to the argument that COVID-19-driven changes may not be sustainable, this essay offers a counter narrative from the Korean context, in which educators re-visited existing school systems and re-constructed policies and teaching practices to fill the educational vacuum caused by the pandemic. This essay specifically builds on interviews conducted with Korean educators throughout the 2020 school year during COVID-19. First, we discuss ownership of educational change as reflected in educators’ narratives. We then explore three driving forces behind the transformation of the “grammar of Korean schooling”: policy discourse about “future education,” professional teaching culture, and administration for creativity. Based on our analysis, we offer several suggestions for policymakers, district leaders, and educators around the world for how to leverage and sustain the educational changes catalyzed by COVID-19. We conclude by arguing that educators’ desires to achieve change must be actualized in schools and policies through collaborative foresight and system-level support.

New Schools in New York City: Incremental Changes in Transformative Initiatives in the 21st Century

Background: After the turn of the 21st century in New York City, mayor Michael Bloomberg launched major initiatives to open new small schools and new charter schools as a central piece of a strategy to transform schooling and produce dramatically better results. Although more than 550 new public schools and charter schools were established in New York City between 2003 and 2015, with some increases in graduation rates, the focus on new schools has subsided, many aspects of schooling remain the same, and significant inequities in performance persist. Purpose/Objective: This article explores the confluence of factors that help to explain how some new practices emerge even as many aspects of what Tyack and Cuban called the “grammar of schooling” endure. Design/Analysis: To achieve this objective, this article undertakes a historical analysis that highlights the intersection among the goals, capacity demands, and values in the new school initiatives, and the needs, existing capabilities, and values of four intermediaries involved in creating new small schools or new charter schools. This analysis looks particularly at the different choices these organizations made about when to connect to and distance themselves from these initiatives (when to “bridge” and “buffer”) and the role those choices played in the extent and nature of their own growth and the evolution of the new schools initiatives. Findings/Conclusion: Even with political support and initiatives that were supposed to provide some freedom to innovate outside conventional constraints, these intermediaries had to find ways to fit within the needs, demands, and values of the school system at that time. At the same time, the intersections in the evolution of these organizations and the wider system also help to explain how they were able to influence the evolution of the policy environment, sustain themselves, and create some new practices, products, and services even as the focus on new school creation subsided.

The dynamic tension at the core of the grammar of schooling

The American system of schooling has been remarkably resistant to change, with most changes coming in the form of tinkering around the edges. Large-scale reform that alters what David Tyack and Larry Cuban (1995) referred to as the “grammar of schooling” has tended to fizzle out. David Labaree suggests that the practices that are most likely to become part of this persistent grammar of schooling, such as the age-graded classroom, are those that align with schools’ social mission and that meet schools’ organizational needs. Those two elements of the grammar of schooling must remain in balance if reform is to succeed.

Burning beds and political stasis: Bernard Stiegler and the entropic nature of Australian anti-reflexivity

The entropic state that engulfed the East Coast of Australia in the first eight months of 2020 followed thirty years of uninterrupted economic growth and 10 years of tenuous federal governments divided on the question of climate change. The twin geophysical crises of catastrophic bushfires and the COVID-19 pandemic have led to a public reckoning around our guardianship of the environment, as well as our relationship with science and indigenous knowledge. Congruent with this was the rapid transformation of both schools and universities to online learning, causing the most significant rupture to the traditional ‘grammar of schooling’ for decades. This unprecedented conflation of crises has resulted in the unusual situation where education can be radically transformed, as the material conditions that usually remain latent (thus negating the possibility for change) suddenly exist. As a result, there has been an increased openness to pedagogies of potentiality, as schools and universities resist the urge to ‘return to normal’. Amongst these pedagogies, the philosophy of Bernard Stiegler is unique in its direct response to the entropic state with a counter-impulse, negantropy, which seeks to harness our technological capacity under an ethos of care and unite it with our existential purpose to flourish and thrive. This paper will consider the possibilities of Stiegler’s utopian call for action in relation to the Australian context, as schools and universities reconceptualise the sharing of knowledge and the purpose of education that seeks to rectify the gaps of the past.

Adapting to the ILE Practicum: New Grammar for Changing Times in Initial Teacher Education

The global emergence of Innovative Learning Environments (ILEs) has disrupted the conventional grammar of schooling prompting more collaborative and flexible teaching and learning arrangements. While the emergence of a new grammar and its complexity for experienced teachers is acknowledged, the ramifications for initial teacher education (ITE) are under-researched. With practicum at the heart of ITE it is vital that teacher educators become conversant with the grammar of an ILE practicum so they can support student teachers to thrive in these environments. Utilising Gislason’s (Gislason, Learning Environments Research 13:127–145, 2010; Gislason, Alternator and Deed (eds), School space and its occupation: Conceptualising and evaluating innovative learning environments, Brill Sense, The Netherlands, 2018; Gislason, Learning Environments Research 13:127–145, 2010) school environment model and an instrumental case study design we identified key influences for three key participant groups within the ecology of practicum—student teachers, associate teachers and teacher educators. Our findings suggest the conventional grammar of practicum is incongruous with a collaborative grammar that underpins an ILE practicum. Such a grammar amplifies the importance of relational, leadership, and collaborative skills for student teachers as well as highlighting a necessity to re-imagine practicum traditions such as full management.

New schools in New York City and Singapore

This paper compares the evolution of two initiatives—one in Singapore and one in New York City—designed expressly to support the development and spread of new and innovative school models. These two initiatives—Future Schools in Singapore and the iZone in New York City—reflected the hope that new school models and associated innovations could be incubated and then replicated to help create system-wide conditions that would allow new approaches to schooling to emerge. Despite dramatically different system contexts—in terms of governance, politics and professional capacity—we show how both initiatives have to deal with basic institutional, political and societal conditions that sustain conventional educational practice. We focus particularly on how common factors like capacity demands, frequent changes in policies and emerging technologies create opportunities for the development of some new resources and practices even as they reinforce many aspects of the conventional "grammar of schooling." Although this analysis emphasizes common challenges for developing more "innovative" approaches to schooling, we highlight as well the often-unanticipated developments that contribute to smaller scale innovations and incremental change.

Tracking, knowledge, and the organisation of secondary schooling: teachers’ representations and explanations

ABSTRACT Most European secondary-school systems are articulated by different forms of an academic-vocational divide that are critical in understanding the (re)production of social inequality. By providing distinct curricular and pedagogical codes and a markedly different distribution of knowledge between tracks, tracking leads to profound and distinct learning opportunities for students. The objective of this article is twofold: first, we wish to enquire into the relationship between tracking and knowledge distribution as explained and represented by teachers; second, we aim to identify the mechanisms explaining this relationship as acknowledged in these actors’ discourses and experiences. The analysis draws on 72 in-depth interviews with principals, coordination teams and tutors from lower-secondary education, the Baccalaureate and VET in eight schools in Barcelona. The results provide, on the one hand, a thick description of the dichotomised attributes that teachers assign to academic and vocational knowledge. On the other, we identify three principal mechanisms that, according to the school actors who were interviewed, explain the segmented distribution of knowledge between the Baccalaureate and VET: the stratification of the school system, the grammar of secondary schooling and the learning cultures of both tracks.

The slow dichotomization of elementary classroom roles. 'Grammar of schooling' and the estrangement of classrooms in Western Europe (1830-1900)

ABSTRACT Before and during the era when mass elementary schooling took off, children populated classrooms in many roles and not only as learners. The traditional teaching situation was actually full of children in roles as instructors, inspectors, and helpers, among others. In this contribution, the dichotomisation of expected classroom roles, being a central aspect of the grammar of schooling, is in focus. This dichotomisation resulted in one adult and trained teacher controlling all relevant activity in the classroom and children being confined to only one function: learning. On the basis of teaching manuals for school management and the organisation of teaching from four European countries, the article presents evidence of the slow process of the marginalisation of children from other roles than learning. Children as “learners only” was a relatively late reality for elementary and primary classrooms in Western Europe. The article proposes an interpretation of these trends as being an estrangement of classrooms from other fields of practice, particularly concerning the increasing division of labour in the modern world and the activities of children as workers and carers outside classrooms.

Educational Change by Design: Creating a School of the Future

This case study, framed within a school–university partnership, highlights the tensions inherent to employing design-based approaches for educational change. The case illustrates core tensions between an abductive, open-ended, design-based approach to change versus more traditional (deductive/inductive) approaches to managing change in schools. The design process serves as a way to break away from the traditional “grammar of schooling” (Tyack & Tobin) in a system unaccustomed to radical change. The case highlights the challenges of maintaining fidelity to the design process within a range of logistical and resources constraints, such as the time available to participants to engage in the process, and the difficulty of rapidly prototyping a new school model within an existing educational ecosystem. In the teaching notes, we recommend a theoretical lens and set of questions for educational leaders to reflect on as they consider approaches to educational change in their own settings.

Changing the Grammar of Schooling: An Appraisal and a Research Agenda

Previous articleNext article No AccessEditorial IntroductionChanging the Grammar of Schooling: An Appraisal and a Research AgendaJal Mehta and Amanda DatnowJal MehtaHarvard University Search for more articles by this author and Amanda DatnowUniversity of California, San Diego Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by American Journal of Education Volume 126, Number 4August 2020Changing the Grammar of Schooling Sponsored by the Penn State College of Education Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/709960 Views: 913Total views on this site Citations: 7Citations are reported from Crossref HistoryPublished online July 16, 2020 © 2020 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Amanda Datnow, Mariko Yoshisato, Brandie Macdonald, Jessica Trejos, Benjamin C. Kennedy Bridging Educational Change and Social Justice: A Call to the Field, Educational Researcher 52, no.11 (Nov 2022): 29–38.https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X221138837Danielle Sutherland, Katharine Strunk, Jesse Nagel, Tara Kilbride Boxed in: Structural limitations to flexible pacing in Michigan competency-based education pilot districts, Journal of Educational Change 31 (Sep 2022).https://doi.org/10.1007/s10833-022-09466-2Deborah Loewenberg Ball Reimagining American Education: Possible Futures, Phi Delta Kappan 103, no.77 (Mar 2022): 51–55.https://doi.org/10.1177/00317217221092236Cecilia Azorín, Michael Fullan Leading new, deeper forms of collaborative cultures: Questions and pathways, Journal of Educational Change 23, no.11 (Jan 2022): 131–143.https://doi.org/10.1007/s10833-021-09448-wCorrie Stone-Johnson The Global Challenge of Educational Reform, (Sep 2022): 985–998.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99097-8_54David F. Labaree The dynamic tension at the core of the grammar of schooling, Phi Delta Kappan 103, no.22 (Sep 2021): 28–32.https://doi.org/10.1177/00317217211051141Corrie Stone-Johnson The Global Challenge of Educational Reform, (Mar 2021): 1–14.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39666-4_54-1

A Neoliberal Grammar of Schooling? How a Progressive Charter School Moved toward Market Values

Although initially ideologically diverse, the charter school movement has become increasingly aligned with neoliberal ideology, which assumes that public services, including education, are improved through market forces, such as accountability, competition, efficiency, and managerialism. Yet little is known about how leaders of ideologically progressive charter schools sustain their founding pedagogical and political missions amid widespread market values. This qualitative case study of one progressive charter school in New York City investigates this phenomenon. Findings demonstrate that the school’s enrollment, instructional, school governance, and community engagement practices moved toward market values as school leaders and board trustees prioritized attaining favorable test outcomes, garnering resources, and ensuring the renewal of the school’s charter. Findings illustrate a neoliberal grammar of schooling, or powerful forces that led school leaders to move their practices toward market values, in turn constraining the realization of the school’s founding progressive mission.

Overlapping Opportunities for Social-Emotional and Literacy Learning in Elementary-Grade Project-Based Instruction

Project-based learning (PBL) approaches seek to challenge the grammar of schooling by providing opportunities for students to (a) explore meaningful questions using multiple disciplinary lenses; (b...

De-schooling Well-being: Toward a Learning-Oriented Definition

Purpose: (1) Critique conventional schooling as detrimental to student well-being and learning. (2) Articulate an alternative that is more conducive to learning and well-being in classrooms, schools, and educational systems. Design/Approach/Methods: I review the historical functions of compulsory schooling, the main critiques to conventional schooling developed over the past century, emerging knowledge on the neuroscience of learning and well-being, and cases of large-scale pedagogical transformation from the Global South. Findings: I argue that conventional schooling is detrimental to well-being, that deep learning is a precursor of well-being, and that compulsory schooling is not designed to cultivate it. Well-being has to be de-schooled so that students thrive in schools: The grammar of schooling has to be replaced with the language of learning. This requires deep and widespread cultural change, and some movements of pedagogical renewal from the Global South offer important lessons on how to accomplish this. Originality/Value: Expanding the scope of existing debates about student well-being by questioning the assumption that compulsory schooling is inherently good and pointing out that unless the default culture of schooling is replaced with cultures of robust learning, student well-being efforts will simply reproduce the very problems they seek to solve.

Navigating Disciplinary Boundaries: Two Stories of Collaborative Teaching in English and Social Studies

ABSTRACT This narrative inquiry shares the stories of two teachers’ collaborative experiences with their counterparts in social studies and English. The primary objective was to learn about how these teachers, within separate teaching dyads, understand and attempt to accomplish the goals of both colleagues’ disciplines while planning instruction. Field texts were collected over two years and consist of stories derived from five recorded conversations, observations, e-mail exchanges, student work samples, teaching materials, PowerPoint slides, and reflective notes. Data were analyzed through the three-dimensional space approach. Findings suggest that a) collaborative tensions arise due to “grammar of schooling,” including the structure and the culture of teaching the subject matters in middle and high schools; b) cross-disciplinary collaboration serves as a space for teacher learning; and c) despite their intentions and willingness, the two teachers tend to implement a hybrid of disciplinary literacy practices coupled with their old notion of literacy when collaborating.

Separating newcomers: pragmatism or ideology? Schools’ responses to newly arrived migrants in Flanders

ABSTRACT This paper focusses on the organisational responses of secondary schools to newly arrived migrant students. In Flanders (the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium), as in many other European regions, newly arrived students are placed in segregated classes that aim to prepare them for integration in mainstream education. Deriving from, on the one hand, academic critiques on the principle of segregated classes and, on the other hand, the autonomy that schools have regarding practices for newly arrived students, the paper aims to shed detailed light on the organisational choices schools make regarding newcomers and how professionals in these schools experience and relate to these choices. Based on representative survey-data and in-depth interviews, gathered for a research project for the Flemish Department of Education, the results address class allocation, interaction with mainstream classes and transition procedures in the education for newly arrived students. The findings indicate that education for newcomers, in spite of being poorly embedded in the mainstream educational system, opts for organisational practices similar to those in mainstream education and very typical for the basic grammar of schooling. Professionals in these schools express doubt and ambiguity over many of these choices, sometimes paving the way for departure from customary practices.