“Learning Organisations and Schools must … “ Are such phrases oxymoronic or our current reality?
Paper presented at the British Educational Research Association Annual Conference, University of Glamorgan, 14-17 September 2005
Frank Bonner Lincoln University
Abstract
A critique of the concept involved in the phrase “learning organisations” is offered, showing the elision involved in refusing to consider the people who constitute an organisation. I extend the critique by considering similar underpinning concepts in such exhortations as, “schools must … “. Personal recollections from the school where I worked are contrasted with the anodyne discourse under discussion. Some examples drawn from interview data are offered to show how the individual worldviews of two former colleagues conflict with the bland assumptions in the title phrase, ‘Learning Organisations’. The historical roots of this development are traced, showing how rationality has been gendered, allowing an abstract, logical, emotion free framework to develop. The historical change in the legal status of companies, whereby judges rewrote the law to treat businesses as ‘individual persons’, is shown to be an important part of the gendering process. An alternative view of rationality is offered, utilising a perspective that reintroduces the maternal and the archaic, emotions and the body into the overwhelmingly masculine rationality found in many texts from government and academic sources. This alternative viewpoint is further developed using Arendt’s work on the differences between instrumental living and a life devoted to finding meaning. Finally I suggest the masculine bias of rationality is unlikely removed so we must seek a form of post-modern rationality.
Introduction
In this paper, I suggest there are likely to be serious problems of understanding, caused by the use of phrases in which the active verb ‘learning’ is linked to nouns describing educational organisations e.g. school or college, as in the title. I will comment on the concepts of a ‘learning organisation’ and such phrases as “schools must” and provide a theoretical framework for the interrogation of empirical data collected during interviews with two former colleagues. One had moved following a major breakdown in relationships, the other to work in a laboratory to further her studies. The interview data will be used to show that loosely coupled systems in education are at odds with concepts such as ‘learning organisations’. Di Stefano argues that, ‘what has passed as a gender neutral vocabulary of reason, morality, cognitive development, autonomy, justice, history, theory, progress and enlightenment is imbued with masculine meaning’ (Di Stefano 1990 p 64). I will demonstrate the ‘gendered rationality’ in the continuing use of such terms as the ‘learning organisation’, demonstrating the need to revisit this theme, by referring to recent literature from government departments and academic texts.
My interest in and unease with the concepts underpinning such phrases as, ‘the learning organisation’ and ‘schools must …’, developed following the first OFSTED inspection of the special school where I worked as part of the senior management team. We decided structured help would be useful and began using “The Empowered School” by Hargreaves and Hopkins. Our first post–inspection School Development Plan incorporated many of their ideas e.g. auditing current practice, deciding how to improve practice, setting priorities and ensuring we planned to maintain existing practice. Having read many more texts on educational management in the years that followed, I began to have doubts about Hargreaves and Hopkins’ concept of “school”. They begin with an apparently innocuous question in Chapter 1, “Where is the school now?” (Hargreaves and Hopkins 1991 p 3). Of course readers know what they mean, or do they? Flippant users of such texts may be tempted to respond to this rhetorical question with a geographical location for the school building.
Those who ‘know’ what Hargreaves and Hopkins mean, may be thinking of the school’s senior management, or perhaps the department in which they work, or the view from beyond such school-based spaces as seen by a governor. Hargreaves and Hopkins offer no help, as they do not make clear for whom they are writing. However, given the multiplicity of viewpoints from which we can approach ‘school development’, Hargreaves and Hopkins avoidance of specificity is an inevitable consequence of their style of writing.
Further down page 3 we find, “the school’s vision” and “When a school embarks on development planning for the first time …” then “The … development plan … brings together … national and LEA priorities [and] the school’s aims and values” (Op. cit p 3).
The authors continue using the same phraseology in Chapter 2, where they outline a suggested approach to development and maintenance, using such phrases as, “Changing a school’s culture”, “At present, schools are facing” and “Schools need to maintain some continuity”. How could a ‘school’ have ‘aims and values’? Similarly, how can a ‘school’ embark on anything? I began to question how it is possible for “schools” to “face” anything or “maintain some continuity” (Op. cit. p 17). Hargreaves and Hopkins appear to be working from the premise that “Organisations are real entities with a life of their own” (Greenfield and Ribbin 1993 Table 1.1 p 7). Hargreaves and Hopkins appear to assume the school they mention, is a member of a “species” (Op. cit. Table 1.1 p 7) of almost identical organisations, all members of which can be treated the same. My experience as a practitioner does not support Hargreaves and Hopkins’ viewpoint. The school where I worked for twenty-five years was a “social reality”, continuously remade, according to the “subjective meanings which individuals [working there] place[d] upon their actions” (Op. cit Table 1.1 p 7). Höpfl notes the desire of the senior staff in an organisation to construct “the organisation as a purposive entity”, urging others to see the organisation as an individual, capable of decisions, having ‘directedness’. She then proceeds to show how this view is developed to become more “subtle … [by the] construction of the organisation as a fictive entity”. There is an ironic note here; a play on the shifting nature of ‘the organisation’, between the ‘purposive directedness’ and the invented realities that become obvious, once the language of ‘targets set, achievements measured’ is unpacked (Höpfl 2003 pp 28-29).
I argue therefore that Hargreaves and Hopkins are concerned to develop the concept of an “organisation as a purposive entity” despite the necessary homogenising involved (Höpfl 2003 p 29). Höpfl shows that many writers on organisations accept and use the thesis advanced by Hargreaves and Hopkins. Nevertheless, she comments on their arguments with a “discourse of maternity” which she argues, “subverts the dominant social discourse [of] order, rationality and patriarchal regulation” (Op. cit. p 29). Höpfl contrasts the disciplined, measured “text” of the establishment seeking “greater commitment [and] improved performance” with the absence of the material bodies that comprise the ‘organisation.’ The “pain of labour” is therefore removed from the rhetoric and therefore, from any “need of ministry” (Op. cit p 29). That is how such phrases as “schools are facing” (Hargreaves and Hopkins 1991 p 17) and “ the factors [needed] to become a learning organisation” (Hall and Hord 2001 p 195) can be written, ignoring the emotions of the people involved in the “invented social reality” (Greenfield and Ribbin 1993 Table 1.1 p 7).
Colleagues and pupils remembered
I am reminded of this “social reality” by the photograph seen over my right shoulder as I write. Taken in 2000, it shows the pupils and staff of the school where I worked. Looking closely I can see Deirdre who taught a primary class, nominally responsible for and thus in charge of Miranda, one of the two support staff working with that group (Not their real names). In Deidre’s view the latter’s intransigence, continuing over a full school year, caused them both to leave for other jobs. Before this, they each came to explain and justify themselves to me, but their words neither explained nor changed anything. Miranda’s words seemed to me a verbal screen over her unacknowledged emotions, which drove her to ignore and obstruct Deidre whenever possible, while the latter recited the acts of ill will and explored her bewilderment.
Near these two adults are several young people, then just beginning their secondary exam courses, now several years older and some way through their first post-school year.
There in the middle row, young Harold, described by his mother as a “beautiful, empty box” and Marie, who “laid waste to the classroom” in Deidre’s wryly accurate phrase.
In the back row, I can see several other adults who have now left to work elsewhere. New people were appointed and after a while, the replacements seemed always to have been part of the school staff. The mix of relationships, the planning and teaching, arguments, the concerns which absorbed my energies as I taught in that special school, were the source of much enjoyment, fun, tiredness and increased understanding of people. On so many days, there were unanticipated demands or those rare but precious “aha” moments, when we reached a level of shared understanding and I learned as much as I taught.
The elision of complexity
I argue that the messy intricacy of that small school, where fifty plus adults were responsible for the education of 120 plus children, ranging in age from three and a half to seventeen cannot be reduced to the trope so frequently used by Hargreaves and Hopkins. Seldom in their writing do they acknowledge the complex, constantly evolving environment of the communities we label ‘schools’. This may in part be due to the book’s genesis. In the Acknowledgements, the authors say the book is “a direct result of our work on the School Development Plans project funded by the Department of Education and Science … and … this book is a compilation of [the] four [Project] documents, which remain Crown property (Op. cit. p ix). Academic texts are not the only source of the collective term “schools”. “Qualifying to Teach” is a typical document from the Teacher Training Agency (TTA 2002). Under the heading, “Requirements for Initial Teacher Training”, there are four entries, complemented by “The Requirements [which] underline the essential contribution that schools and other settings make to initial teacher training” (emphasis added) (Op. cit. 2002 p 3). The anonymous writer of the “Standards & Requirements” document for the TTA has employed the same ‘shorthand’ as Hargreaves and Hopkins. The geographical and psychological distance between the TTA staff in London and the many educational communities for whom the document was written, seem to have allowed the writer(s) to avoid imagining and writing for the varied audiences involved. Hargreaves and Hopkins are using the same method, perhaps reasoning that teachers using their book would need to locate the messages in their own school community context. This is what happened within our Senior Management Team (SMT), but philosophical and practical problems remain when the reality of school communities is compressed into the trope, “schools”. The school communities I have known more closely resemble the “organized anarchies [with their] problematic goals … unclear technology … [and] fluid participation” than the anodyne word ‘schools’ will allow (Cohen and March 1989 p 109).
Other writers also elide the complexities of institutions, inhabited by the subjective, changing realities of people and subsume these complexities into an amorphous mass called a school. In the introductory chapter to their edited collection, “Strategic Leadership and Educational Improvement” Preedy, Glatter and Wise (2003) use phrases such as, “empirical studies of how schools … gather and analyse environmental information” or “other accounts … [show] … the limited capacity for organisations to anticipate and respond purposively”. There are over forty similar phrases, all addressing the ‘school’ or ‘college’ as an entity with an independent existence (emphases added). This unspecified ‘mass’ somehow transcends the people who fill the building during a working day. Yet this dependence on such portmanteau phrases, as schools and colleges is combined with a sensitivity to the importance of “organisational members”, in the section on The External Context, when the usefulness of “environmental scanning” to school leaders is briefly outlined. Even here though, the leaders are seen “us[ing] strategies that seek to reduce the dependence of the organisation on its environment”, (italics in the original) (Preedy, Glatter and Wise 2003 pp 1 - 26).
Strain begins his paper, “Schools in a Learning Society” with the question, “What role are schools to have in the establishment of a ‘Learning Society’” (Strain 2000 p 281) (emphasis added). He goes on to define “Social institutions … [as] living human creations, continually reviewing and remaking themselves”, but what does this mean? Strain is acknowledging the lives involved in a school community, while reducing those lives to one homogeneous being, which somehow incorporates everyone involved. Where in this strange personage do visitors fit? Where can parents be found, or contractors who work on the fabric of the building during a summer holiday?
Strain then, “requires schools to re-examine … aspects of their work, seeking to identify a form and structure of learning, capable of fulfilling the aspirations of the learning society [and] to identify a working model of a school as an organisation … appropriate to advanced late modern societies” (Op. cit p 282). Nowhere does he pose or try to answer the complex question, which person, or which people should do this, head teacher, senior staff, parents, pupils or governors?