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During stress, teachers undergo an identity passage. In the first phase, many cherished aspects of the self are attacked and become separated from the personal identity until the individual becomes completely disorientated. During transition, rock bottom is reached, but also the beginnings of redemption appear through 'cocooning' and the influence of significant others. Self-renewal follows during which, for some, a new personal identity is constructed, mostly through relocating and modifying the teacher role, or through re-routeing out of teaching altogether. Using evidence derived from a series of detailed, longitudinal interviews with a group of 21 secondary school teachers, all clinically diagnosed as suffering from stress, the authors examine the structure and process of this identity passage and explore how the extreme emotions involved are socially structured.

There are signs that teams are becoming more popular in ethnographic research. New technology and, in the UK, the Research Assessment Exercise have facilitated the establishment and continuance of teams. In this paper, the authors discuss their experiences in one particular research team in recent years. Securing adequate funding has been the essential structural prerequisite. The authors distinguish among project, federated, and whole teams, depending on function and level of analysis. They consider team structure, approach, business, and processes, and the relationship between individual and team. Teamwork has enabled a wider and deeper coverage of work, a broader comparative base, and multiple researcher triangulation. The team provides a forum for the discussion of ethical issues, an immediate supportive reference group. It has opened up horizons, and promoted individual change and development. It has aided analysis and writing, and promoted clearer and more robust arguments. The article concludes wit...

A new system of schools’ inspection, under the ‘Office for Standards in Education’ (OFSTED), was set up in 1992. Nominally independent, it was appointed within the frame of the general restructuring of public institutions and of the government's marketization and managerialization of the education system in the late 1980s and early 1990s. As the operations of OFSTED bear directly on inspectors and teachers, it provides good opportunities to study the effects on them of restructuring and how they cope with the powers of the slate. The values behind the new reforms contrast sharply with the prevailing child‐centred discourse preferred by primary school teachers. Inspectors, in the actual execution of inspections, represented themselves as moderating their approach in a kind of humanistic managerialism which apparently goes some way to meeting the teachers’ position. However, this is not how the inspections were experienced by the teachers. They were conscious of a deep and damaging value clash in t...

In a qualitative study of a primary school, it was found that the technicist approach of an OFSTED inspection impacted against the holistic and humanistic values of the teachers, producing a high degree of trauma among them. This trauma was not a simple emotional response of the moment, nor was it a product of school failure or lack of leadership, for neither of these applied. It was, rather, socially and politically constructed. The teachers’ reactions have to be seen against the background of government reforms over the last decade. In this context, the particular emotions released suggest that the inspection examined here had a latent function of deprofessionalisation. Professional uncertainty was induced, with teachers experiencing confusion, anomie, anxiety and doubt about their competence. They also suffered an assault on their personal selves, closely associated among primary teachers with their professional roles. This took the form of mortification, dehumanisation, the loss of pedagogic ...

Using an interpretive approach, this article examines the career of a major government initiative, Curriculum Organization and Classroom Practice in Primary Schools: A Discussion Paper, from inception to implementation. The document, launched in 1992, aroused spirited and sometimes acrimonious debate in the press, and among politicians, educationists and teachers. The widely differing interpretations of the paper are seen as products partly of differing interests and partly of the different contexts and phases the paper went through. These consisted of contexts of general influence; opportunity and initiation; text production; immediate reception; mediation; and implementation. These contexts fall into two broad stages: the political, when the policies of the ‘New Right’ dictated the course and reception of action; and the educational, when the document was mediated into practice through the LEA (showing ‘strategic leadership') and head teachers (acting as ‘gatekeepers') and appropriated by class...

The magnitude of recharge beneath rehabilitated landforms at former mine sites is one of many variables required for a comprehensive assessment of potential future environmental impacts of those sites. The magnitude of net groundwater recharge that may occur on the rehabilitated Range Uranium Mines landform is estimated to be of the order of 2–5% of the incident rainfall, that is, about 25 to 65 mm/a.

Alienative learning is a common feature in schools. Approaches aiming to combat it, such as child‐centred progressivism or critical pedagogy, do not appear to have been very productive as yet in the empowerment of students. Alienative learning, in fact, seems set to increase in the drift to intensification. This paper takes a different approach, seeking to identify instances of empowerment that have actually occurred, and examining their properties. Examples include moments or periods of profound insight; the cultivation of marginality; positive trauma; communitas; and social outrage. These are all potentially radicalising states. Among the factors for achieving breakthroughs is the use of pupils as ‘critical others’. An example is given involving some children with special needs, wherein the learning and development of all, including teachers, was enhanced.

New government policies have to be mediated through teachers. Research among some teachers in primary schools revealed a number of creative adaptations to the National Curriculum. Some were strongly ‘resisting’ some elements. Where conditions were favourable, this developed into ‘appropriation’. A powerful aid towards appropriation can be ‘resourcing‘—ways in which the teacher role can be enhanced. At times, the teacher's work might be ‘enriched’ by the National Curriculum. However, at other times, another teacher might be forced to ‘re‐route’, and retire from teaching. Running through all these modes of adaptation is the interconnecting theme of self‐determination. Four aspects of this—self‐defence, self‐reinforcement, self‐realisation and self‐renewal—are revealed in the adaptations. The changes have been cathartic for teachers’ sense of self, but some, at least, are emerging stronger than before, whether they are still teaching or not.

From time to time, education is marked by critical events. In contrast to routine processes and any gradual cumulation of learning, these bring radical change in both pupils and teachers. They also have a confirmatory and preservation function in sustaining teachers’ beliefs, interests and commitment, and aiding strategic redefinition. They could have a wider influence through a ‘community of interactive professionals’. The critical events studied are marked by constructivist learning theory and relationships that generate distinct forms of communitas. They go through fairly well‐defined stages from initial conceptualisation to final celebration, with a rhythm of learning between structure and freedom developing. The conditions favourable to the occurrence of critical events include legitimation within the curriculum structure, a facilitative school ethos and, above all, a critical agent.

Summary D.H. Hargreaves's “traumatic theory of aesthetic learning” is reviewed in the light of research on educational events in the areas of creative writing and drama. If the full educational benefits of conversive drama are to be realised, they have to be seen within the context of more gradual cumulation of skills and knowledge. Before the trauma, students are prepared by confidence‐building, having their sensitivities sharpened, abilities encouraged, and acquiring control and power of expression. During and after the trauma there is considerable personal development, students discovering new things about themselves, maturing, and in some cases being transformed. They acquire more of the art of learning, involving skills of both expression and appreciation. There is also notable social development, resulting in the experience of communitas, wherein participants rise above institutional structures and statuses and develop exceptional community spirit. Above all, conversive trauma excites the emotions, ...

Following the Swann Report of 1985 and its recommendation of ‘Education for All’, the need for multicultural education in all areas was generally recognized. School‐based attempts to respond have been little researched, as has minority ethnic pupil development from the pupil's point of view. Eighteen months’ ethnographic work in six main primary schools revealed a number of predominant themes, including that reported here of ‘integration and disintegration’. Their nature, the implications for pupil learning, and the conditions attending them are explored in relation to adapting to school in the early years; transfer between schools at ages seven and nine; relationships among pupils; and pupils’ experience of the curriculum. Integration and disintegration were found to be associated with certain factors at general societal and governmental, community, institutional and individual levels. Integrational features appear to promote pupil learning and development, disintegrational to obstruct and disru...

Until fairly recently views of teacher careers were dominated by notions of an objective, progressive structure populated by males. Though the majority of teachers were women, they were not reckoned to have careers within the profession. They occupied the broad, flat base of the squat opportunity pyramid, together with some starter, and older 'failed' males. Furthermore, their residence there was intermittent, as they took time off for child-bearing and -rearing. Teaching was thus a useful occupation for women, as their role was perceived, as it allowed for such exits and re-entries.

Studies of pupils’ perceptions of school must give priority to pupils’ interpretive processes. In one secondary modern school, this revealed different groups characterised by group perspectives. Different educational routes are negotiated with adaptations that may lead to the same affective response. School is a multi‐facetted institution, and pupil reaction can be uneven both between and within areas.

There has been some discussion recently of 'coping' or 'survival strategies', practised by schoolteachers (Hargreaves, 1977, 1978, 1979; Woods, 1979, 1980a, b, 1981; Lacey, 1977; Pollard, 1981). Interest has focused on identifying and describing the various types, and analysing the ways in which they represent the resolution of tensions or contradictions set up when social constraint meets personal intention. In this exposition, some attention has been given to humour, a means of communication and self-expression which is common to many teacher and pupil strategies. However, its full import as a coping agency in schools has not, as yet, been realised. In other institutions it has been shown to be a powerful resource in interpersonal relations in several ways, integrating, differentiating, liberating and at times constraining (Martineau, 1972). As an instrument to protect and develop the self, as political weapon to defend against or strike at an enemy, as a social regulator to highlight norms, as a bargaining counter, or as a cement for social relationshumour has been shown to be used in all these ways (Martineau, 1972). Rarely, however, have all these functions been observed operating in the same institution at the same time; and never has the one principle common to most forms of humour-i.e. its coping nature-been adequately explained sociologically. Observation of humour and laughter within schools presses for rectification of these omissions.

Teacher decision-making is subject to internal and external forces. The 'system disruptive' pupils, however, have misinterpreted the cues and made unrealistic choices, selecting examination subjects when they should have chosen non-examination, or vice versa. The product of the collision of internal and external forces, of commitment and constraint, is 'accommodation'. The mass of tactics employed in the general strategy are revealed by teacher perceptions of subject choice. Teachers are forced by the twin pressures of commitment and structural constraint to accommodate problems and develop survival strategies. The 'choice' pupils made was represented as the most crucial decision they would make in their school career—indeed, as one of the most important decisions of their lives. The overall effect is to get the pupils to articulate the teachers' decisions. Alienative divisiveness could be further reduced by involving parents as active contributors to the educational function, as in community schools, rather than working for their separation.

∗ Standards in English Schools, by John Marks, Caroline Cox and Maciej Pomian‐Srzednicki, National Council for Educational Standards, London (1983); Examination Results in Selective and Non Selective Schools, by Jane Steedman, National Children's Bureau, London (1983), pp. 151, £15‐00; Reconstructions of Secondary Education, by J. Gray, A. F. McPherson and D. Raffe, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London (1983).

Abstarct A wide gap has opened between teachers’ Protestant Ethic‐type notions of work, and pupils’ own perceptions of work. Pupils resist socialization into an antiquated model which is losing structural support in society at large, and about which teachers themselves are rather ambivalent, and are not always moved by the thought of personal gain. They are, however, deeply influenced by the status of the work and the personal qualities of the teacher. For them, work is relationships.

1. User Perceptions and the Participant Observer Interpretive research can add a new dimension to the study of user perceptions. There are two main problems in employing interviews and questionnaires:(a) methodological problems. Teacher utterances are governed by the form of question and the circumstances in which they are put. Quite often a researcher puts questions derived from his milieu, in an artificial situation where the teacher casts about in his mind to answer in the same terms. These answers are then held to reflect the teacher's observed actions. Not surprisingly, perhaps, some severe disjunctions have been discovered between teacher words and teacher actions, and these have been made the basis for some widely-held reports.1 The error is to assume a common reality between interview and teaching event. As a precaution against this, some advocate investigating the teacher's own rationale for his actions,2 but this raises another problem. If the first problem is "how do we know the informant is telling the truth as he sees it, and not in the researcher's terms?" the second is "what sort of truth is it?" This is particularly difficult in teaching because teachers are so vulnerable to children, parents, other teachers, and not least, educational researchers and theorists. Who knows what sort of ingenious defence mechanisms they have constructed, and how these occlude, or otherwise affect one's "findings"? Do they know themselves? What if, for example, the defence mechanisms of the profession have become reified over the years, are internalised during training, or at least initiation, into teaching, and are reproduced as a form of rhetoric? How can we get a purchase on that? Certainly not by asking teachers for accounts of their actions, or at least, not just by doing that.