School of Education

 

Wednesday 1 June 2022, 16:00-17:00

Room 213 St Andrew's Building, 11 Eldon Street, Glasgow G3 6NH

 

From the Grammar to the Lexicon of Schooling: Rethinking Educational Change

Abstract: Researchers and reformers have confronted how educational change might be conceptualised and achieved, especially in a post-COVID-19 landscape. Tyack and Tobin, in their 1994 article ‘The “Grammar” of Schooling: Why has it been so hard to change?’ argued that several persistent features of the American education system comprise a ‘grammar’. In this presentation, I draw on a recent article with Bryan Mann to reconceptualise this grammar by taking seriously Tyack and Tobin’s insistence that ‘grammar’ organises meaning. Starting here, I argue that what they took to be grammatical features are the products and not the producers of meaning. I draw on the cases of the United States and England to argue that four international discourses have performed this meaning-making work: industrialisation; welfarism; neoliberalism and neoconservatism. These are the ‘grammars’ of schooling—and of society. Their discursive products, including age grading and sorting into subjects are, I suggest, ‘lexical’ features that express the grammar. I use this new concept of lexical features to explain the multi-directional interplay between discourse and educational feature, and to think through key implications for realising and conceptualising educational change

 

About the speaker

Steven Courtney is a critical sociologist of educational leadership and policy with a research focus on the interplay of structure, agency and power. Along with Jessica Gerrard and Glenn Savage, he is Co-Editor-in-Chief of the journal, Critical Studies in Education. Steven is Research Coordinator at the Manchester Institute of Education, University of Manchester, and an elected Council Member at the British Educational Leadership, Management and Administration Society. 

 

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First published: 29 March 2022