Key themes in Qualitative Research and Enquiry Based Learning: case study and representation

Return to Enquiry Learning home

Return to Education Issues menu

Return to Cultural Issues menu

The following employs qualitative research methods in constructing and analysing a case study of a school.

Voices and Visions

Making Sense a Large Secondary School

(A study carried out in Ontario, Canada)
John Schostak

j.schostak@mmu.ac.uk
1992

Making sense of a large and complex institution cannot aim for a full and final account. There is no 'master narrative', no way of providing the total image, or complete meaning. Perhaps there once was when words like 'progress' or 'vocational education' locked into a general ethos that was at one with the modernising vision of the first half of the twentieth century. Grey Secondary School began its life in 1912, not too far removed in time - nor in place - from Henry Ford's realisation of the production line rationalisation that typified Modern Western social-economic conditions until the information revolution gathered pace from the 1960s. Even if there could have been, there cannot now be a single Case Study that represents the life of an institution. Rather, it is a collection composed of narratives formed out of the voices caught in notes or tape recordings, fortuitiously, or formalised in interviews; formed from documentation, the formal and the informal, systematically or opportunistically collected; and shaped by the interests, idiosyncracies and limitations of the researcher-writer. Out of this cluster of narratives and images two options occur: either a collage artfully presented; or clusters structured to form dialogues. But the options are not either/or and their relationship plays out, like a fishing line, (or more contemporaneously, fibre optics) potentials, possibilities which provoke alternatives - conflictual, congruous, complementary or ironic. What is represented is not a school, but a play of interpretations, sensuous images, expressions out of which representations are made which connect selves to groups, to institutional patterns, to sub-cultural and cultural 'worlds'. All of this variation makes the sign at the entrance, 'Grey Secondary School', deceptive in its implication of a single referent, a something that can unambiguously be pointed out and taken in with a single all encompassing gaze and accounted for at a stroke.

The account that follows is ordered around:

a. the metaphor of a conceptual architecture
b. the position of voice in the 'archetexture' of discourse
c. the imaginary composed of the 'imagined community'
d. the metaphor of a journey
e. the metaphor of gossip in relation to 'research practice'

These are not organised as such as 'section headings', rather they are themes, and sometimes the margins which frame a discussion. Central throughout is the metaphor of achitecture which speaks of the structuring of concepts, discourse and text as much as of physical arrangements of space, rooms, floors, levels and the relationships to communities through town or city development. The metaphor itself can be de-formed -through punning - to produce architexture, or even archetexture, terms to be defined through use in the next section. The first refers to the play of words producing the sense of a multileveled construction, planned like a building but having the attributes of a text. At a deeper level there are the archetypal levels of language, folklore, myth, and personal unconscious imagery and memories which erupt into the planned textual structures through which everyday life is institutionally ordered - the archetext.

Voices and Journeys
The voice connotes presence. There before me is this person who is speaking to me. The voice authoritatively positions speaker and listener creating the archetypal positions of Self and Other, I and You, speaking into being some sense of speaker-identity, some world of feelings, objects and actions. When this is transcribed, the marks on the page are used to stand for that presence of self and world, yoking a passing conversation into a text. There is a sense of authority there in the marks. Yet, the meaning that may seem single and unambiguous in the speaking and listening slips away and reflective interpretation shows itself to be a complex, multi-leveled process where 'presence' is taken apart. What is re-presented is something else, it is textured, evoking a context of texts in which meaning hides, reveals itself and slips away into other ranges of interpretation bound by other texts.
The research output from this Grey case study is now collected together and 'boxed'. The taperecordings of voices, the notes in the note-book evoke in the imagination the scent of journeys taken, journeys through conceptual, historical and personal meanings, feelings and images. These journeys were again multidimensional, not structured as through the rational/bureaucratic designs of the holiday tour operator but rather like a collage of accounts not hung randomly but connected through the experience of journeying, of going some place even if the map and destination always changes.

Le Corbusier, in designing his cities, distinguished between the 'way of the donkey' and the 'way of man'. The donkey will detour around any obstacle. The path is winding and rambling. There is no hurry to get anywhere. The way of man, he said, was of straight lines, that is, of direct action. The latter is the world of rational architecture and town planning. It has its complement in the rational bureaucratic design, hierarchical organisational structure with its lines of authority and the delivery of planned curricula in teaching. To make a pun, it is the architextual world of rational discourse, constructed to impose plans and behaviours to accomplish pre-designed outcomes. Counter to this are the resistences made by the reluctant conscripts, or hired employees of the plan. Alternative to this, is the exploratory ramble where the development of experience, the accidental encounter and the unexpected discovery is the purpose of the journey. To continue the pun, it is the archetextual world of personal, social and cultural experience producing a curriculum which develops through time taking its own unexpected twists. Such a narrative is an archetecture of time, place, discourse and event through which is composed an identity in history.

The City, The School: making an entrance
Entrance to the main foyer of the school is by a flight of concrete steps from the street, past large wood and glass swing doors to further steps inside:

Clearly a large school, my first experience of it appropriately, was to go off in the wrong direction as I searched for (the principal's) office. Still I had a nice walk down to the students' office, figuring that anything title(d) 'main office' ought to know where I'm supposed to be. Of course not. But they told me where (the principal's) office was. Back where I'd come from. OK so I gave in and asked a student who pointed to an anonymous looking door. Inside was an office area & (the principal's) office.

(fieldnotes Oct. 9. 91)

These first impressions tie in with later accounts by others about how the size of the school led to fragmentation into departments, even courses.

Upon entering, I thought I had arrived late but they were not expecting me. "Ivor Goodson made arrangements....",

"Who?"

Nevertheless I talked for a while with the Principal and arranged with him some interviewing for the afternoon. The feeling was one of helpfulness.

Initially it was not easy for me to find my way around. I wanted to get some kind of mental map of the place, find out where I was and where I was supposed to be. Going back down the main road into the city centre for lunch helped me to orientate myself. The impression was of a busy commercial centre focusing upon service industries. Walking back to the school I noticed groups of adolescents, particularly outside a donut diner, a trio of girls sat outside a church on its steps, smoking. As I approached the front steps of the school a few students were sat talking, and inside there were more sat chatting on the steps. The only notice providing directions that I could see was one stating "Main Office' pointing in the opposite direction to that of the Principal's. The notice infront of his office area was labelled 'resources'. My map was beginning to fill out. However, 'resources' and the long corridors that I supposed lay behind various doors were as yet a mystery to me.

The first steps towards a mental map were made the night before in my lodgings. This was based upon a set of notes and memories derived from a conversation with Ivor about a week before. It was a kind of checklist of data to get: interviews, documents, observations, places/locations in the school. There were also orienting questions:

• nature of curriculum on offer; how it was developed
• processes underlying delivery of curriculum: administration
• organisational mechanisms for delivery, monitoring, quality
assurance
• who has responsibility for what
• how decisions are made
• educational beliefs/purposes
• student/school profile - socio-economic
• choices/options available for students
• role for staff development in curriculum development?
study of the breadth of curriculum available, the way it's developed, administered, delivered in practice, monitored and its impact on students.

(fieldnotes 9/10/91)

In a sense, this crude framework with its final statement about the scope of the study provided my entrance ticket into the school. In various forms I replayed the statement and asked the questions. With this I was able not only to orient myself but also the people I met: "Well, it's a brief study set up by Ivor Goodson, you may have heard about ... No? Well, he's a prof at UWO and is doing an historical study of the school. There's someone else who's doing the history bit, and my brief is to get a contemporary picture. Of course, I can't cover the whole school in all its complexity in this short time, but I can at least get something of what it means to a range of teachers and a few students.....Do you mind if I tape record? Of course, I'll anonymise whatever I write for publication .... ".

The recordings, the notes and the memories mesh with reflections, research discourses and texts of all kinds. The product, in some way, is this text which represents a peculiar kind of journey, a journey that points to other possible journeys, other ways of narrating experiences common to a number of raconteurs who together write themselves into the history of the school.
It was interesting to note the impressions of other 'newcomers' like the senior administrator who said in response to being asked what was most exciting about the school:

Oh, its energy. Its energy. It just vibrates. You just walk around this place and its just whooshh (laughs). It's amazing there's just so many things happening that you you, I whenever I venture into the hall I know that I'm, I'm going to be coming upon some kind of, of uh new happening (laughs) I just know that. No matter what it is, whether it's a group of kids that, that perhaps will just talk to you and and just give you some information, or it's breaking up a fight, or it's talking to a group of teachers, or walking down the cafeteria and seeing the, the activity in there. It's amazing. So, I I find that to be the most exciting thing, just, just the sheer size and uh complexity of the place.

Other schools did not feel like this because in part:

Well, the school is structured I think a little bit differently than most. It's a school that um appeals to the misfit. A school that, you'd want to come here because, it's a little bit different it doesn't have quite the structure as other schools. It has um, a freeness, you know that that, allows every student I think and teacher in this building a certain feeling of comfort because, because of that. Maybe it's, maybe we're not the strongest administrative team and don't really huh nail the kids. But I think the kids really like that and respond to it well and respect it a little bit more than in another school, that would just go crazy because of that. It seems that we set rules and we allow the kids to be just a little bit off-centre, you know? And because of that off-centredness it gives this whole place just a little bit of a difference. So it's very much like a community college in in many ways.
Many, including students, talked of the sense of 'always something going on' in the school. One teacher, perhaps the most enthusiastic of all summed up his feelings as, "This school is exciting. Everyday is like an event here. There's always something going on. Positively, you know. Just an exciting school. You c' you can feel the excitement in the air."

The image of the school, historically constructed, defines its cast of players, orients the newcomer and provides explanations for observed conduct. The sense of its becoming a 'community school' cements an historic connection with the city and its work-a-day purposes as well as its developing pluralistic vision of community.

Imagining the School: citizenship, work and community
The connections between the city and the school are carried in the voices and the experiences of the interviewees. The connection is there as a symbol and as an experience. It is a strength and a problem. It is enshrined as 'History'. History is a kind of journey through time, a progression from one point to another, one stage of development to another, narrated from some present point of reflection It may be a single grand narrative of Progress (the rational planning architextual view); or, an aggregate of mini-dramas, a coagulation of biographies and of countervailing discourses (the experiential archetextual view). However, it is not either/or, rather a complex of both which creates a reality (perhaps some complex of realities) which is different from either. The history of its telling congeals around organising images, some of which aspire to a dominant view through which a history may be told, a vision of the future promoted and a plan of action for the present rationally constructed; and some tell the story of difficulties, failures, battles. during interviews, when people tell a narrative account of development, changes, or events that have passed by these hang together, not randomly but as an architecture of time, place and event drawn together to compose an identity in history.

Together with a package of materials given to me, about the courses available in the school was a professionally published (1987) book celebrating the 75th anniversary of the school. The history of the school was a key focus for defining its purpose, its image of itself, its development. Many current staff were previously students at the school, their memories long and filled with stories of past students and staff. The imaginative grasp of the school revealed in their interviews generated comparisons between what was felt to be its original mission and the new realities. The Art department was able to provide a history which linked it to 'a 125 year tradition because there was a mechanics institute in the city (...) that taught trades and skills and part of that was uh, the china painting industry which was pretty big in the city in in the early 1900s and maybe before' (Head of Art). This provided a sense of continuous development with the staff of the department being encouraged to experiment. The school was seen by others as starting life as 'a technical and commercial high school' that did not have today's mix of students who are now taken from a wider community of interests, nor did it have as many courses as offered today, including OACs . There is the continuing sense of change, the need to make changes, respond to changes and prepare for changes, in particular the increasing sense of pluralism:

(The staff in their professional development days) want to talk about multiculturalism , they want to talk about all those kinds of things and the issues out of that prejudice, racism all that sort of thing and how it affects them and this school, and this school has 46 different languages. OK? And we do have um, the three genetic strains all uh, all here. And so far we're doing very very well with our, with our mosaic of people and people are working together, but there are tensions. And so uh, they wanna do that and we're working on that as well. All of these things, I hope, will provide people with better people skills, so that we can deal with, in a better situation one on one.

Most spoke affectionately of the school, its history, its type of student and its effect on students. One teacher expressed it as changing students from having been failures at state school to being successful trades people in later life. Where the school had been more authoritarian, it was now freer with all the judgemental pros and cons that long memories generate:

for example I have, I'm in the cafeteria one day supervising and I asked three boys to please, and I said please, pick up your garbage and put it in the can. And um one kid just kept on going. Um 'hey, how bou', just a minute, just a minute.' 'Don't touch me. Don't touch me,' he said. Now that infuriates me. An' he, as he was going out he says, 'It is not manditory that we have to pick that up and put it in the garbage.' That wouldn't have happened in the old days. Th' that kid would just get, probably pushed against the wall thumped around a bit and um, likely been asked to leave school but as it is this guy just walked away. I don't know who he is. Uh, there were three. They're black guys, um, which makes it all the worse. But I can't identify them. That wouldn't have happened before. So there's, it's a different relationship. But I think it's better. I don't think there's the same number of fights um but perhaps we've gone a little bit too far. I think that we've gone too far. That it has to come back just a, just a touch. But I don't, I wouldn't like it to go back to the way it was before.

The new realities and practices were enthusiastically proclaimed by the senior management. The imaginative grasp of the school offered by the senior administrators is organised by a vision the elements of which are 'selling', 'buying in', 'entrepreneurship', 'risk', 'ownership', 'empowerment', and 'self-responsibility'. It is composed of the rational planning metaphors of business which re-specifies the I and You of language into those of buyer and seller, or producer and consumer and positions school as itself a provider of a certain kind of commodity or output. The business metaphor, in general, ties the school to the view of the surrounding city not only as a place of commerce and industry but as a continuous thread which provides the rationale for its curriculum. This vision is articulated through accounts from the administrators which point not only to close relationships with local businesses but also to the ethos, management structure and attitudes of business as a model for education. The concepts, the metaphors, the way in which 'I', 'You', 'They', 'We' and 'Them' are systematically positioned and arranged in narratives, analyses and descriptions comprises a distinct discourse genre which is articulated in anecdotes and other personal accounts of experience. Thus:

VP: We have um 'adopt a school' situations where a High School and an industry are closely linked, you know for mutual benefit. In our 'adopt a school' industry is Kelloggs, Kelloggs of Canada. And we recently had uh Jerry (Maizner?) who is the vice-president of manufacturing uh, speak to our Heads at our Head's retreat. Our Head's retreat was dealing with our new supervision model and the supervision model is based on this whole ownership aspect of things, and goal setting and and working through and so forth. And um, his whole company has gone through some massive changes at that place.
JFS: This is from top right down to bottom?
VP: Through, yes.
JFS: Yeah.
VP: See that, and uh one of the things that they're working on is, is getting rid of that concept of top to bottom. OK? And saying, instead of 'Well here's my boss and this boss and that boss and that boss. What they've done at Kelloggs is they've eliminated management levels. And they are saying to the individual person on the floor, 'he has had some ideas?', 'You know how to make this thing happen?'

Two distinct management architectures are being mapped out: the top-to-bottom and the horizontal. The first involves a hierarchical organisation of power which is constituted by a discourse of power. The second demands the appropriate participation of team members which is articulated through a discourse of negotiation and empowerment. So, applying this to school, for example:

VP: Our philosophy as an administrative team is 'Well, here's an issue, what do you think?' Before teachers'd said 'well, this kid's screwing up. It's your problem now.' I had a teacher say that to me last year I said 'Woah, time out. This is not my problem, it is our problem. First of all, the student's, secondly, you have input, I have input and so forth and we will solve this cooperatively, because that's the only way we're going to get any mutual respect and we're also going to make better decisions, because we have more input.' And that's going, and that's coming.

The management philosophy is here articulated anecdotally. The anecdote represents people in relation, engaged in a typical exchange calling for a management response. An anecdote is architectural in that it is like a room, a stairway or a floor in an office block. It is a bit of that overall structure and cannot exist except by reference to it. The senior administrator in the above anecdote repositions himself, the complaining teacher, and the student into an alternative achitecture of relationships. Where there was a boundary between what is 'my problem' and what is 'your problem' it no longer exists and is replaced by the inclusive 'our problem'. Where I thought I was looking over the garden fence looking at your problem I now find myself standing in the same puddle.
The new philosophy legitimises a particular response, a response that suspends or even disrupts previously expected responses to the same kind of situation. The overall 'philosophy' can be said to provide a way to organise social action that dislocates the centre of decision making, from its central position at the top of a hierarchy,and returns it to the individual who 'owns' the problem. This is a view that people have to 'buy' and thus has to be 'sold' in order to make the school work. The final reference underlying the anecdote is that of the market place. Thus, the anecdote itself points to the larger discourse structures through which it takes its life.

Education becomes a product that requires consumers:

(..) once we've got teachers and once we've got curriculum, then it's a matter of really selling .. to the students and the community, ah of what we have to offer. People have to buy in, if they're going to learn. If you're going to buy a car for example and you've got four/five models to choose from, then the model that you select is obviously the model you've bought into, whether the salesman has given you the pitch, or whatever the case is. We have to do the same thing to kids. We have to say "Look here are the skills that we can offer you, here are the things that have to happen. Alright? Life is not what you see on television, or in the movies. Alright? And we have to do this and you, if you buy in, then we can give you three or four skills, computation skills, literacy skills, you know, those kinds of things and decision making and so on. If we can do that then you're going to have a shot at doing some things for you.

The metaphor of the car sale connects commercial life and educational need in a way which promotes a concept of what is to count as 'real life' as opposed to television or the movies. Thus what is being sold is a vision of life and how education provides skills which can give the opportunity of 'doing some things for you'. That Grey is somehow 'real' unlike many other schools was a theme often repeated by staff and the students interviewed. Part of this realness was related to the 'mix' of students in terms of ethnicity and social class. This mix was also subsumed under the sales rhetoric of choice where individuality was expressed as 'style' choices or sub-cultural choices. since there was such a range, then no one could look 'odd'. This 'individuality' could be metaphorically employed to extend the notion of choice to include 'buying' into the structured choices offered by the school. The semiotic connections flow in a kind of closed circuit of imagery between business, style and consumer choice and what Grey had to offer in terms of work opportunities and individual expression.

The powerful impression of the school that begins to be built up through the voices of the teachers and the administrators is of the 'entrepreneur' of going and selling course ideas, getting funding and building or reinforcing relationships with local employers. It is not just simply a vocational curriculum that is being offered but a total package, a way of life. Students do not just learn how to fix a car engine or remodel the battered body of a car, but also customer relations, the total employee-sales-service identity that goes with being a member of a maket economy.

It is a circuitry of images of identities and forms of behaviour which aspires to construct a vision of 'real life' and in the process discriminates between its vision and the sense of social fragmentation and break down that many staff expressed. There was a vision of the citizen and the role of the school being involved in an Herculean effort of reconstruction, of building community and spirit. This effort finds its articulation as a process of curriculum construction, not only in the traditional sense, but also as an underlying effort to frame the course of reflection, expression and action of staff and students in their formal and informal interactions.

Construction of the Curriculum Discourse(s) and Text(s)
There are many ways to define 'curriculum'. At its most general it refers to the arrangement - whether deliberate or accidental, formally constructed, or informal, overt or hidden, sanctioned or forbidden - of experiences, reflection upon those experiences, the manner in which those experiences are expressed, recorded and represented, and the forms of conduct, decisions and action that follow. Although not meant to be an exhaustive definition it is sufficient to point to those politically legitimated texts that fomr official curricula as well as the more covert forms of the hidden curriculum and what may be termed the forbidden curriculum. This latter refers to those forms of knowledge and action that cannot be talked about, seen or carried out in any official capacity. Typically their content includes sexuality, drugs, violence, and the counter-discourses of criminality and political critique. In short, the curriculum of a school is not a single unambiguous text, but rather a multi-layered cluster of discourses many of which run counter to each other. It arises in interaction as people reflect upon their own experiences in relation to the experiences of others, form judgements about what is possible, what is real, what is likely, what is of value and how best to get what they want from life. The curriculum, as a term, stands for the construction of an imaginative grasp of life - what counts as knowledge, what counts as real and what can be done in the world. The province and the school has its official versions, students and teachers have theirs and from the multitude of conversations the unwritten curricula of experience can be mapped. Thus the curriculum - at all its levels - is critical in the formation of an imaginative grasp of the world, accounting for what is within the grasp of an individual and what is outside the grasp. Constructing transformative curricula which extend the imaginative grasp and thus what is realisable for an individual is an educative ideal. Whether that ideal is realisable in schools depends critically upon how teachers and students perceive the experience of schooling.

How does what teachers perceive to be the curriculum come about?

VP: (..) What they (the government) usually do is that they end up creating documents (...) and these documents will have within them objectives related to skills and content. And sometimes they become more specific in the last little while. Then its up to the boards and the schools to flesh those out, to make them work. So we've had at our board level a number of curriculum committees using guidelines from the government and developing courses in everything from mathematics to dramatic arts and history through to technical subjects. So a lot of our writing by our own teachers within the system. Then it's a matter of field testing that in the schools, bringing that information back and using that to change the courses

The official curriculum text is the product of several tiers of activity. Each layer is involved in textual production of different kinds. It has the feel of an action research-like process where curricular specifications are placed into propositional form for testing in practice. This is not felt as a mechanical operation since there is the opportunity for personal selection, organisation and emphasis:

my feeling always was, as a classroom teacher, is that 'yes OK I've got these guidelines now, and yes, Ok the Board committee has done this. I still felt as if I had free rein to take a look at what they're trying to do, use the material from the Board and the ideas and then use that in my shaping of the curriculum for my students. Because I know my students better than the Ministry does or than any committee does. I also know my strengths and weaknesses as a teacher better than they do. And so for example, I would take topics, or skills and say 'alright they want uh, these kinds of skills they want to talk about interpretation and analysation and those kinds of things within the broad range of content.' And then I would pick and choose where I would put those things in. I didn't take the committee's suggestion and just implement them because I always felt uncomfortable doing that. I would do that with some things but not with all. So I felt I was free, really to just pick and choose what I wanted to as long as I was meeting the needs of the students regarding the objectives, the skills and the knowledge.

The process through which the curriculum took shape was framed within the discourses of the classroom, the knowledge constructed of 'my strengths and weakness', and knowledge of 'my students' to 'meet the needs of the students'. The opportunity to make such informed judgements and interpretations may exist within one view but not another. So:

(...) I would with teachers who've said 'It says here I have to teach this, you know. And I would challenge them and say 'Well OK but what are the high order skills, what are the low order skills, what really has to be done here? And if we're doing content for the sake of content then we'd better explain that to the students or explain that to ourselves.'

In having to teach this, the implied vision is of a master text that commands and explains all. Counter to this, is the notion that all is open to re-interpretation. This enables the development of a greater imaginative reach to engage in an expanded range of actions. Re-interpretation, however, is not entirely free. There is a counter-text constructed through the discourse of the marketplace. This expands the possibilities through acts of indiviudal selection, combination and re-combinations to tailor teaching. In particular, curriculum interpretation is part of the process of developing the unique selling point:

the curriculum is unique as I expressed before in that within the city it's the only site for a technical vocational art programme. Um and within even the province it's one of very few. Because of that um our guidelines are somewhat indistinct uh, or rather vague as uh as dictated by the province. So um there's, there's been a lot of room for interpretation of our curriculum by the faculty. And uh and there's been a lot of support within the school and within the Board for us to do some rather creative things with our, with our curriculum. And we're rather proud of that.

The uniqueness here is constructed out of a historic discourse which goes back to the beginnings of the school and its original mission. It allows considerable creative variation and is thus desired for that reason. Although a text is produced, interpretation allows the emergence of multiple discourses which take their legitimacy from the printed text. There are two broad 'poles' of decision making located in different arenas, the one system-wide', the other school-based and situation specific. Within the situation specific pole, 'our curriculum' is generated and is applied through individual interpretation in concrete situations. This latter allows for considerable diversity and creativity. While diversity is desired, it also has to be managed. Thus, although curriculum interpretation may be seen from the point of view of the administrator, as a tool to construct a particular alternative imaginative grasp, it has implications for management, both the management of the staff and of the perceptions, intepretations and activities of students who also are constructing some kind of imaginative grasp of the curriculum presented and its relation to a plurality of counter curricula.

Of Visions and Icebergs: The Rationality of the Curriculum: its limits, its margins
In the sense of being a 'course of study' or a 'course of reflection and action', a curriculum is essentially a journey. It is a journey that has to be grasped over time, knitting the fragmentary experiences into some kind of multi-dimensional whole or co-existing plurality of wholes. The tiers in which the official curriculum is framed has at its higher levels in the hierarchy a bureaucratic/rational structure the grip of which is loosened through the processes of interpretation as it passes to the sites of actual implementation. Any sense of a 'master text' as a rational instrument of control and standards setting reaches its limits in actual implementation. It is at the site of practice where negotiations take place between teacher and student that the letter of the text becomes re-inscribed with the visions, beliefs, interests, needs and conflicts of communities of diverse people. The Principal articulates a key vision which frames the texts received from the higher levels for purposes of articulation within the school. The imagery employed by the principal defines his role in relation to the staff and the purposes of the school:

I always use the term 'keep the ship on course', and I know the Titanic and I've read E. J. (..?..). And this thing lists along. However, part of my role is to make sure that happens and that we all are aware of the downs and ups and the peaks and vallies which happen. And in a school like this they're gonna happen. That's a given. But I've gotta keep the ship on course.

That mission statement which took us quite a while to develop is another part of my role. To make sure that we understand what we're trying to do. There's always an ideal. We're not going to make it, probably. But we're sure as hell going to try. And that is in every classroom. Now the objective is that teachers (..) they had a part in developing it, understand it. But the kids know what it is. (A) lot of things we do as educators, we know. Hell nobody else knows.

The sense of keeping the ship on course, the potential icebergs, the misdirections provides an imagery through which relationships between staff, students, community and the wider political and social environment are organised. It is an imagery which raises the limits of its sphere of and scope for rational planning. The iceberg is always potentially there, waiting to punch a hole through the most watertight text. It generates a discourse of direction, striving, and perhaps nobly failing. Fundamentally, from the point of view of the Principal, it inaugurates a democratic discourse to make the acts of educators open to public accountability. This in itself is a central contribution to what counts as the curriculum of the school.

The 'mission statement' which hangs on the Principal's office wall and 'is in every classroom' is an indicator of a discourse that has been put into place, an effort to make a set of values and principles stick, that is, resisting the slide of meanings, the tendencies to interpret or misinterpret. Keeping the ship on course requires managment strategies that promote feedback and constantly engage staff with the central purposes. It also requires a way of hearing those discourses that are at the margins or even normally out of hearing. For example, the Principal considers he gets feedback from teachers but 'Probably don't have enough in place to do that with students.' Nevertheless, he does have informal methods for generating feedback as he describes:

Remember I go back to the visibility thing. Look I'm here awfully early in the morning, part, and it's not, like I don't come to spy on anybody. But when I stand at that mail room down there I can do more in a half an hour from 20 to 8, 20 after 8, talking to every bloody teacher's that in there to find out certain things. And I don't. So, if we have this new initiative in broad based technology in a certain area, and I just say 'How's it goin'?' and they go '(moaning sound)'. You know it doesn't take me too long. And when I talk to kids, like I know, I know what's on talking to kids, now, if I can talk to the right kids. In that Broadcast Grey, (...) We have a new teacher there from CBC, and I talked to the present student (consol's?) in that programme. So I said (..) "How's it going over there?' And he said, 'It's like a breath of fresh air.' He says. Well, I mean there's the answer and uh. But if they had wanted to sabotage me, you know, in a way um, I can't, they might do it for a while but not very long.

The sense of keeping the ship on course and of feedback was raised again when talking about students. He sees students as being at the centre of his vision for the school, in fact, to the extent of seeing himself as a court of last appeal, overriding teachers at times in the interests of the students:

(...) If they (teachers) don't agreee with the VP or the parents I'm the next court of appeal. I reverse some of the decisions which they don't like but I think, that's part of my role. (...) Sometimes I think that we're all out of whak and huh, I said it was simple and easy but I can understand why for some kids the four walled classrooms are not the place to be. It wasn't for me really either. And uh, there are alternative forms of education. Maybe not enough. Maybe because of convenience the other thing, we're too structured in our 76 minute periods, which is too long by the way any way. I'd go nuts.
(...) To keep the ship on course, we do these things. But a lot, a lot of kids do very well though, like, like. But of course that's the plum of everything: the kid whose had it rough, rough, rough but somehow works full time and does it. He's got it together. Like those kids make you feel good. Other kids who are good thinkers and smarter than the teacher which is, no problem there, and are enthusiastic and work orientated and, they do it. So that's the good news, you always, there's good feedback usually. Especially at this school because they're so bloody honest. I mean (laughs) they'll tell you one way or the other.

The ship - Titanic or not - is going somewhere. There is some notion of a goal, a place to end up. However, it is not a simple matter of making directives so that all are acting in concert. Rather, like the architecture of the school, there are a multiplicity of levels, of scenes of action, most hidden from each other given the sheer impossibility of knowing all that is going on, being everywhere at once. There is no complete access to information. However, the Principal has built up some working images of his staff and students. After the 'photo tour' that he took me on we went to have a meal in the canteen. We talked at one point about his staff. It became clear that by and large he was pround of his staff and his school. Of the teachers that he mentioned, the common qualities involved commitment and dedication. He said 'some may be pretty odd but they're good'. He did not care about the 'oddness' it was the fact that 'she's off all round the world and brings back ideas to implement', or 'he used to work in a university', or 'he works from 7 to 9 everyday. He had some animals that had to be kept alive over the summer, so he and sme students came in to do that.' There were many such anecdotal snippets that he could and did tell me. This fund began to comprise his imagery of the school. Of the students, he said, he would tellthem that no one looks odd at this school because 'if you're out of place here, you must really be a jerk.' During our walk around together, everywhere we went, he had a grin and a word to say to passing students, secretaries, teaching staff. Genuine laughter can never be stage managed. There was always a lot of laughter. The students felt free to call out. There was no sense of tenseness, fear, or cowering under the glance of authority.

It is through this kind of working imagery that the school can be imaginatively grasped all of a piece and through such processes a sense of going somewhere for some purpose can be constructed. How then, in particular does the ship run? and where exactly is it going?

Distribution of power and the size of the school
Although the Principal sees himself as keeping the ship on course this does not mean that he is the person who runs it:

Well, I think it's empowerment and that's I know that's a buzz word now, but uh. The Heads in charge of organisational or instructional units, they have to deliver their staff, to make this thing work. If (the Principal's) gonna run this school and he's doing it by the Boss and 'I'm the Boss, you do it', we're dead in the water in two weeks. We'll have a school but the Goddamn place'll be dead. And there'll be confusion and we''ll, teachers will use the shut the door policy. That's when they'll tell you something to do, you'll sit here and say yes. You leave and shut the door. You'll do the same old thing you did. So we empower, trust, give them the reins, let them be involved in the school curriculum decision making. And, and I certainly do that. Maybe to a fault sometimes, some would say, but I don't apologise for that at all. Too many principals want to run the ship. And I want to keep it on the course. I'm not running the ship. I'll make that decision when the storm comes up that we go 2 knots this way or whatever. But uh, if you empower people and say, you are involved, then for God's sakes let 'em do it. Some principals say sure you make, th, their agenda's so planned that the only decisions they give them to make don't mean anything. Those are called throwaways.

Empowerment is a key word in this kind of discourse. It is realised in the organisation of departmentments and committees. This means there are devolved centres of power, where one person can see a department as 'my baby'. In this discourse there is an architecture of control quite different to the linear, hierarchical structure of control. The latter was applicable to the master text formulated at the top and faithfully read for implementation at the lower levels. The new architecture is flatter, decision making is moved outwards towards the departments, each with a mission to 'deliver'. The focus is upon teams and team building. The mission statement acts as a locus, a statement of value which then is to be articulated through team action in specific arenas of action. It is not so much that the direction of the ship has changed, but that the process through which the direction is accomplished has changed. A greater emphasis upon ensuring that there is a shared purpose and direction becomes critical. Where under the hierachical structure the leader could say 'do this' to accomplish a goal, under the flatter empowered structure agreement and complicity has to be sought. The implications of this for roles in the organisation are either a) a team-like structure emerges for planning and decision making, or b) there is frustration that lines of management are confused. As an illustration of the first, a Vice Principal talked about the construction of the 'mission statement', and the structure through which this was accomplished:

(.. ) from the grassroots and through the departments and so forth, we come up with our mission statement, our aims and objectives and so on. It's from there that we will take the time to create policy. The policy then is vetted through the departments and the teachers to find out whether or not the policies are really consistent with what we're trying to do. Once we have the policies in place and once we have the goals in place the structure, the skeleton if you will is already there. It's then a matter of using the rules and the regulations, the policy, the structure, the skeleton in delivering the message to students. And if there are problems, then we have systems by where, you know, teachers having a problem with a student and so forth that goes through a department head or through to vice principal and so on. So we do have those ways of dealing with difficulties. But the structure itself, hopefully, you know, everything is consistent uh with our department structure. Our committee structure is on top of that and that transcends departments. So for example we have a life skills committee. And on the life skills committee we will have members from different areas, academic area, business area, technical area and so forth. Our professional development committee transcends the department structure and so on. So we have those committees layered on top of that as well. It works pretty well.

In effect the mission statement is theleading vision of the school through which conduct and relationships are organised, and are in turn realised through appropriate committee and departmental structures, that is, the system. Thus, the leading vision, in a sense, takes the place of line management, constructing a sense of imaginative grasp of what the institution is about. Each individual is guided by the leading vision and is empowered to take action in order to realise this vision. Thus the mission statement outlines the broad values of the school which then should pervade each interaction between staff and staff and pupils, school and community. The concept of a leading vision is derived from business management theory and is articualted above as the process of 'getting a common vision'. The conceptual structure, the values, the theories of human nature and social organisation implicit constitute a related set of texts and discourses that can be said to compise the planned common 'architexture' of the school. It is here that architecture, organisational structure and associated discourses and texts interplay. Getting such a common vision in a large institution with multiple sites for action where, as the principal pointed out, there are so many graduates each having their own visions, is a problem. Not only that, a mutliplicity of competing 'visions' abound in the wider context within which the school operates. This issue was picked up clearly by a senior teacher in the school:

The biggest problem is getting a common vision, um with uh.. And I'm a great bel', you know I'm a great reader of Toffler. And I like Toffler, he always s' stimulates my mind. But um, you know the acceleration of change, things are changing so fast, what are we really doing anymore, you know like, what's the role of Secondary schools?
I don't think really if you ask anybody .. we really know from a total perspective, are we all aiming at the same thing? I, I don't know uh.. you know we have different govern, parliaments in Ontario and they lead us in different ways. We come up with new bandwagons about, you know this is the way to go, but nothing's a panacea, you know. The only constant is teachers day in and day out are meeting kids in the classroom and trying to do the best they can.
But part of the problem is that the plur', the pluralistic nature of society now, you know, whose needs are you trying to meet? And with the social breakdown, if I can use that term in the sense of family and other social .. The institution of the school is the only one the kids get now. Like the only one that hits them. so now, we're the panacea, you know, we have to teach AIDS, we have to do this, we have to do ... They just keep heaping more on what we're expect to do. And I don't think we can do them all well. First we were never trained to do them, but now all of a sudden this stuff comes on us and ... I think there's a lot of confusion in the ranks, and I don't just mean our ranks, but as far as the leaders are concerned.. I'm not sure what the .. you know where we're totally supposed to .. And I don't think that's unique to us, that's unique in companies, its unique in, you know, governments um I mean we look at any government, governments from your country and ours and, where are they going?
JFS: Just going.
T: Well, going yeah. It seems to have an impetus of its own. But you wonder where the master plan is, you know. I'm not sure there is one. (laughs)

There is the tension portrayed here between the 'master plan' and 'the pluralist nature of society' and the descent into 'bandwagons' and the question of 'whose needs are you trying to meet?' A plurality of 'visions' implies a plurality of discourses and potential directions and goals. A discourse arises not simply as the particular speech of an individual but in response to others, others who are also talking, writing, giving orders, promoting a vision. The discourse in this sense is beyond any single individual's command of it and this gives rise to the sense of the discourse having its 'own impetus' thus its own 'direction' and 'goals' which remain mysterious because beyond a particular person's grasp. Such a discourse takes on the character of 'fate', 'history', 'the social will', 'the will of God' - that is, its texts are composed as ways of interpreting life events, providing some kind of greater value - an archetexture drawing upon more ancient, perhaps mythic layers through which a life grasps at meaning. At one level, it is an impetus that can be situated within a personal biography providing the accounts of goals achieved, dreams abandoned and personal triumphs and tragedies. Or, it can be placed politically within a grander narrative of social change leading ultimately to either the sense of a great social purpose or the disintegration of social life.

On a later occasion, the same teacher returned to the theme of the purpose of education. He said that when he went home at night and was asked whether he had had a good day his reply was typically 'yes'. However, 'what we're doing it for I'm not sure.' He continued that when a student said that he was dropping out because 'what's the purpose of being here', it was not always easy to give a reply, 'Is it for job training, for social reasons, for what? Everyone's got a different answer. And to have a B. A. doesn't mean you'll get a job. Maybe they would be better off not staying at school.' He continued by questionning the link with the community since society is plural, even global. How then does one make sense of the activities of schooling?

One answer is provided by a Vice Principal who elaborated the leading vision of the school in terms of the changes in business demands and operating conditions to generate a sense of Utopian purpose:

I think probably because .. with the 19th century model of industrialisation that we're slowly changing, other countries are further ahead um you have a tendency to have very limited knowledge of a certain area. If you have limited knowledge in one area and someone has limited knowledge in another area and so forth, it takes more effort to get those people to teamwork, to solve any problem um. I've worked in a lot of factories and that when I was going to university and uh (...) but what I found there in working in that, that situation was well 'This went wrong here, well that's not my problem'. 'That went wrong there, that's not my problem'. No one would take ownership - again we come back to that word ownership - of the whole issue. You know as long as I picked up my cheque and I did my job I'm OK. Uh, the new issue, I think, is saying, we want everyone to take responsibility for the whole thing. So for example, if we're building an automobile or whatever the case may be, you. The fact that automobile is a quality automobile is important to me. Not that I put on four bolts in the back wheel, OK and sent it on its way and I don't care if it falls apart. So I think the main advantage to what we're going to be doing is ownership, a broader base of skills, more co-operative learning, and all in all better people. OK? Because that decision making's going to be 'Well, let's do the whole thing, let's make this work'. Be more responsible citizens, maybe that's really Utopian, I don't know but I can see, why they're trying to do that.

Empowerment, ownership, co-operative work, team work, taking responsibility, are key terms in the discourse of a particular vision which contrasts with that of the nineteenth century vision. The vision, it appears, constructs a purpose, that of producing 'more responsible citizens', it has a utopian purpose. A close fit is being sought between comtemporary business practice and educational practice where perhaps the boundary between the two spheres of activity are progressively being blurred in the development of 'responsible citizens' and a 'Utopian' society. In one sense, nothing has changed: the old division of labour, standardisation of technique and product and mass production under the nineteeth century model of industrialisation had its echo in school structures and processes; today, the model has changed and so schools, it is argued, need to re-model. This leads to the issue of where the boundaries are in terms of decision making.

Early in my fieldnote diary I wrote that the principal and one of the the Directors had already provided me with an image of the school as itself a model of where schools should be going. It was talked of as a pionneer in curriculum and organisational sructure. The key word 'empowerment' was frequently employed, the Director echoing what the Principal had said about alowing heads of department autonomy, self responsibility. However, when I asked about being able to do some observation, the Director's reply was swift, 'You'll have to ask the Principal about that.' Thus the line of authority, the boundary between self-responsibility and asking permission, was quite clear. The model of authority was still nestling within the empowerment structure. Thus, there is some overall cohering structure sustained by authority which acts as the defining limits for self-responsibility, empowerment and autonomy.

It seems to me that it is the metaphor of business organisation that acts as the model for the organisation of schooling to produce a particular vision of society geared to the needs of business to exploit resources and to generate and exploit markets. Business -whether its nineteenth century or late twentietieth century versions - has always been structured to coordinate diverse occupational groups for common business purposes whether at home or abraod. Moreover, it has always sought to produce and exploit market diversity for the sale of products and services. Thus pluralism, fragmented social structures, diversity of communities and cultures provide opportunities for exploitation and business activity. The curriculum of the school and its management discourses closely echo the demands of the business culture. The car provides the symbol of business culture. It has a unique place in the dream of the car owning society in twentieth century Western economies - it almost defines the Utopian citizen. The automotive shops of the school are in many ways my abiding impression. Those together with the shop run by the students under the supervision of the Business studies department, the vocational art and design facilities and the Broadcast studio crystalise the sense of production, marketing, service, media and distribution central to market economies. It seems to me the key metaphor to understanding the curriculum on offer, its organisation and its delivery. Like the car the curriculum just goes - where? - anywhere. For what purpose? Just going.

Perhaps why the business structure is so successful as an organising metaphor for everyday life is just because it replaces the need for a deeper sense of meaning which many feel to have been lost. It is capable of organising the activities of the mass millions into those of producer, service provider and consumer without any dependence on particular cultures, meanings, purposes.

The Architecture of School, the Curriculum and its Staff
The students that I talked to did not have a full grasp of the school as a whole. They went to their particular area or rooms, interacted with their friends or class colleagues and teachers and the rest were seen as a mass some of whom were to be avoided. For some the variety of students, their dress, their exuberance was an attraction. For others it was seen as a potential danger. The architecture itself had meanings. One student compared the school with another that she had previously attended that was:

smaller, it's more clean, it's more updated. It's just a nicer school. (...) Like this one looks like you're walking through a sewer in some parts of the school. (laughs)

Whereas her friend liked the school and its subteranean passages thinking of it as 'very nice'. The architecture has meanings and these meanings cohere, or perhaps coagulate, in the production of curricular experiences.

There is an 'organisation' to schooling that on the one hand is the iconic organisational structure of powers and authorities as represented in architecture where space is organised into private rooms and public rooms, with open doors and locked doors, guarded spaces and unguarded spaces. This material architecture engages in complex ways with the social purposes of actors who enter, confront or otherwise encounter these spaces. Just as it is possible to provide a map of the school with each of its areas labelled, so it is possible to map this against a conceptual map of the kinds of studies pursued. Each department and its courses of studies is located in a given physical area. To one student folowing nursing studies it did not seem like a High School. This was one of its attractions for her:

Because it's so specialised. Even though I'm not, but then I 'm not taking the OACs, the grade 12, the grade 11, grade 10. But I find a lot of people who come here are coming here for a specialised thing, radio broadcasting, nursing, art. (The school's) art programme is world known, I'm sure, like it's well known.

The specialisation is implicit in the organisational structure. Drawing upon a list of teachers by department a schema of the main dramatis personae, their relationship to each other and their spatial location could be constructed. Broadly speaking, each of the main departments has its own area. Specialised sub-departments again have their own areas. Some are closely clustered together. Others are spread between two or three levels in the building. With nearly 200 academic staff (including senior administrators) plus 5 discretionary department assistants there is little chance that each knows each other well. The breakdown of the large departments into their sub-departments provides smaller sets of occupational groups who are most likely to interact with each other in a close face to face relationship:

TECHNOLOGICAL STUDIES

Technical Director

This is a diverse group with perhaps some surprising inclusions (e.g., vocational art, TV arts, family studies and health careers). The large department does not therefore imply necessarily a close set of interactions, particularly as the groups itself consists of 70 odd individuals (some names appear under 2 or more headings). Vocational art has a particular history (as already described) and an individual sense of identity quite distinct from say Health careers or automotive. The title 'technological studies' is in this respect a little misleading in that it gives the sense of a common basis which disguises the clear boundaries between the subjects of study. Against this is a real complexity due to the mix of courses offered by the group of departments at different levels some involving real choice, others no choice for students:

(...) because of this .. lack of security about what our actual .. philosophical point is, with the younger students - and the single credit programmes are at this moment still part of the (school) art proper, the vocational programme as I understand it is mixed with the academic single credit programme. And it's my feeling that the student who is only there for one credit and even a compulsory credit, they have no choice about that choice. Um, the relationship between the instructor and that student are colder, more distant. They are .. the relationship is one of quantifying numerically often, um it's one of checking that they go through a number of specific task related activities and achieve those things, whereas I would say the relationship in, at the senior level in the vocational programme is one that is more like a mentor uh midwifery, expeditor um I would not quite say colleague though in some instances I know that that is so um, my personal experience is that a number of the students I have dealt with on that level, I perceive them as colleagues. They are making art, they are exhibiting, exhibiting art more than I am, at this point. And it's a wonderful dialogue, I feel like it's one of the biggest .. treasures and things that keep me going here to find that in people. I probably get more from them than they get from me. I, I .. feel revitalised and rejuvenated by being there.

Apparently more cohesive are the remaining departments: Academic Studies and Business Studies. Academic studies is again a large department covering a range of activities from general to advanced studies for university entrance. In this case there is no overall director, rather each subject area has a major head of department role to lead it:

Again, the liklihood of 'occupational' groupings to occur is high, particularly in English as distinct from say Maths or Physical Education. In the larger departments this is likely to subdivide again according to friendship groups.

The Business Studies Department lists the following sub-departments:

There are the further departments of:

These collections of occupational groupings underline both the variety and the need for structures that generate some common purpose. While walking with one of hte directors on a journey through a department of the school, the diversity and the architectural structure again meshed to provide a concrete sense of the distinct locations of discourses, their relative boundedness, suggestive of resistance to change from the top:

JFS: Has (the school) got one vision or a multiplicity of visions?
DH: Well, we have a mission statement which is so broad that uh you know, to provide a learning environment, you know for students but uh, um a positive venture. But but I think it has a multiplicity of
JFS: Do they overlap or are they in conflict, do you reckon?
DH: (laughs) That's a tough question. There's some, there's some people in some departments who you wonder sometimes whether they're in the same building, you know and, then other times, you you, the light shines and and you see some things that um, it's pretty tough to answer that question in a place like this 'cos it's so diverse. Hopefully we're all in the, in the same tune but you know I mean its, it's very, that that's a very hard question to answer because very little, very o', very rarely can you get a hundred and eighty people to sit down and kind of agree on the sme thing. By nature we are very independent people.

Nevertheless, talking of the material structure of the school and the options its provides for dialogue and interaction, he said, 'And the whole thing breeds isolation, you know, the whole concept, breeds isolation.' Once a month the whole 180 odd staff come together in a staff meeting in the auditororium or crowded into the resource centre. Once a week the senior administrators meet. There are departmental meetings and meetings which cross the departments. In these way a kind of control of discourses is constructed which weave across the school's disparate activities. Thus, there is an organisation of the kinds of discourses and actions that are encouraged or discouraged or outlawed within the particular spaces on offer to individuals. This organisation of discourses and actions is in effect the curriculum which is on offer as it is variously interpreted and brought into being through the everyday school-based talk and action of the teachers. This curriculum and the ways in which it is interpreted through the voices of teachers and students offers ways of seeing, bodies of belief, frameworks of action and of reflection upon action. Those discourses and actions that are discouraged or outlawed form, in effect, a counter-curriculum which in turn is variously interpreted and brought into being through the multiplicity of counter-discourses. Curriculum and counter-curriculum as used in the sense here, are not to be confused with those documents produced by schools or other bodies. They are not to be thought of as a body of text readily available for inspection, nor as a shared body of opinion or knowledge to be transmitted. Rather, the curricula arise at the point of intersection (or association, or juxtaposition) as self and other engage in talk and action. Like the bringing together of hydrogen and oxygen, at some point, through the organisation of the association of elements, something else is produced, water. Similarly, it is this something else that is the curriculum or counter-curriculum.

Within the context of the curriculum that has been and is being produced in everyday interaction, are the textual curricular productions of the Government, the Ministry, the School Board, the School. Under the plurality of visions inspired in this production some official sense of what the curriculum ought to be is produced. The official task is to bring everyday practice and experience in line with the official versions. This, in the light of discourses appealing to beliefs and visions counter to those of official discourses, necessitates the development of discourse strategies that can compel, seduce, persuade. In a pluralistic arena where democratic values, expectations and a concern for rights are part of the ingredients, there is a seduction in which discourses of liberation, education, empowerment and development are inscribed like theatrical make-up over the structures of coercive or exploitative power. The one masks the other, seeks to fool the intellect, the desires and the senses. It attempts an enchantment. The school, architecturally, is iconic of other power structures, while proclaiming an empowering rhetoric, a rhetoric of 'keys' to creative, self-fulfilling experiences free of compulsion. From the point of view of those engaged in the discourses, there is not necesarily any intentional act of deception here. Rather, it is a participation in discourses the effects of which can be to deceive the participants.

The complex relationship between architecture, discourse, action and curriculum is illustrated in more detail in the following extract on the management and administration of a department:

One of the difficulties for me in the school is the fact, in administrating it, is the fact that we're not in one nice neat corner of the school. I'm spread all over the place. So that, in trying to, there are 14 people in the department, and some of them never see each other from one month's end to the other, because they're spread all over, kind of doing their own thing, it's fragmentation. Um that means that I have to do extra things in order to meet the staff and get out and have them see one another. So what I, what we do is we have a depart', full department meeting once a month and it becomes very important that meeting, because it's the first, the only time in the month where we all get together as a group to talk about any common concerns we have. So that as you go through this tour , you'll see what I mean because we're all over the place. People tend to be, like business studies teachers are in about five different offices, there's two or three in this place and two or three in another floor and a bunch down in the basement. So I'm all over. And I guess my own management style is, I do a lot of walking. Now that probably helps my health. OK? But I very rarely put notes in memos, people's boxes, I get out. And in that way I'm doing several things. OK? I'm seeing people that otherwise I may never see from one day's end to the next and also I'm getting a picture of what's going on in their classes, so they get used to me dropping in and out of classes at any time of the day at any time. And I try and get around on a regular basis.

An architecture demands a journey. It cannot be seen all at once, although conceptually it may be held in mind as something that exists 'all at once'. Each journey is like the relationship between a given text and language. Language - its rules, its vocabulary - can be conceived of as being given 'all at once' (synchronic). However, the actual selection of what to say is unique and not pregiven (diachronic). In an architecture that is peopled and where people do different things in different rooms or areas an infinite number of journeys is possible. Each journey has its own history of where I went, who I saw and what I said and did, what I found out and what I know and can or may tell. By doing 'a lot of walking' in order to gain an imaginative grasp of what is going on a kind of control is being exerted. The task is to engineer a negotiated vision by maintaining a discourse while allowing considerable autonomy. This means each individual has a stake in the outcomes. The controls become internalised through the discourse. What is the seen on the journey is open to comparison and judgement about whether they are 'on course' or not. Each individual is positioned by the discourse into appropriate spheres of responsibility and conduct, placed into positions of trust:

we are under the same umbrella as guidance. Basically we're separate but under and that's because the boss of that couldn't handle .. this school's too big for that particular mandate. So, (name's) the guidance head. This is, I'm looking after student uh special ed. And I keep her posted. We talk. But this is my baby. I look after this. (...) Things are really working here and one of the reasons is because she lets me do my job. And I just keep her posted as to what, I let her know what she has to know.

The search is for administrative consistency, putting as many people as possible into a position of having to act in concert:

Uh try to get as many people helping with the problem as possible. That's what we're trying to do and again, you know it's consitent with , with the main goals, which, one of the main goals of course is decision making.

To some extent, the architecture of the school militates against the desired 'architexture', that is the material structure does not fit with the desired conceptual structure. At one point when I was being shown round the school by a head of department my attention was directed to round tables in a classroom. The old tables had been taken out because they were suitable for 'chalk and talk' but not for discussion. Discussion required round tables where people could look at each other. Later, I was shown a room with long linear tiers of desks and other rooms where there were open planned work stations served by computers. This led to a further discussion about the relationship between material structures and the curriculum:..

what needs do we have? I mean if we were to tear this place down and build a new one, what kind of building would you want to meet the curriculum of today? What are the limitations in this building that prevent us from doing what we should be doing? And perhaps what we should be looking at is larger teaching areas rather than individual classrooms with the ability of three or four teachers working out of an area, doing an integrated curriculum and you maybe have 60 kids in there, as opposed to three different rooms with three different teachers doing three different isolated things. Maybe that's what we're looking at. I dunno but this is part of that thinking. And and I, I would feel also that has to change is the administrative structure rather than having what we've had now for thirty years or forty years where we have a principal, vice principals and the department heads of departments and units, the um perhaps what we need is a totally different structure, perhaps what we need is chairmen, or chair persons of various areas, perhaps there shoul be someone in charge of two or three of those units. So that in a sense, there isn't that .. those compartments of departments but there's a cluster of depar', and I think technological studies is on the right track. Uh (name of director) might have talked about his clusters, where you're talking about the technology of a construction cluster and the, some other type of cluster, where you're putting a lot of like courses under one umbrella where before they may have been treated totally in isolation. I think we're talking the same in the Business and Academic area too where perhaps um um we might (a line/aligned?) for example with, we might be with the English department and the History department and business which sounds crazy but maybe we could be in the, in the room, or maybe we coul dprovide a service through our courses of teaching kids how to use the word processing package, so that when they went to their English class, the English teacher could then benefit from the students using the software for their English courses, but that the English teacher doesn't have to teach the software. Because that's what we're getting into.

If you, if you give all these computers to the English, are they going to have to teach their brand of software to their kids? They shouldn't be in that business. They should be able to have kids trained to use the software, the the selected software, but perhaps they get that training in another area, perhaps it's the business area through our courses that teaches them how to use the software and all they do is apply it in the other courses. That would mean then that it would be nice to have an administrative structure that looked after that aspect of it.. N N N perhaps we different organisational units in order to do that. And I can see team teaching coming in and all kinds of things. So I think what's, what's hurting us now is our structure. It's obsolete in many respects.

In this case structure refers to both the architectural and the 'people structure'. The old departmental boundaries are becoming obsolete just as much as is the actual layout of the building itself. While change is excitedly anticpated for some, for others there is a sense of powerlessness in the face of change:

It's hard to say why teachers are feeling powerless maybe because they just feel that there's a lack of respect for teachers by, by students and also sometimes by administration. We get uh the paper shuffle around here is just horrendous and you're getting tons of paper (...). Sometimes the administration doesn't like it when you follow the procedure that they have made up because if everyone followed that procedure this place wouldn't run because of the number of kids here. So they almost are selective in what they, sometimes want us to do so teachers get frustrated. The teacher that does exactly what they're supposed to do um they sort of get mad at because uh he's making more work for them because he's trying to follow procedure. We put out terrible communications in this school to kids. We put out a (..) a calender, for the first uh, for kids, for all the kids to look at and there were four glaring errors in it, with dates, looked like, we started Christmas at the wrong time of the year (laughs), (...) we exam days that were wrong in there and no one seems to care that much to the point where, there were other person, there were policies written down there, and they were the policies, they were flipflapped around and we didn't, we were not supposed to follow this one and that one. We gave this up to kids, kids would take it home to parents. If they followed what that said we would've really been in a mess and no one seemed all that concerned about it. A lot of people just said 'Oh, don't worry they don't read it anyway.' And I really feel bad that we put out poor information to the kids. Uh, it makes us look bad. And it m', it // it makes the teachers feel a little bad. Like, the sort of laugh, they never know when the other shoe is gonna hit the floor again eh, 'what er what are we gonna change now?'

This extract from an inteview with an academic teacher points to the discourses at the margins that represent the views of some who feel at most risk, or feel that something has been lost. Like any institution undergoing change from the impact of innocvations and anticpated innovations, some staff will feel de-skilled, others threatened, and yet others will need to mourn the loss of the old.

Many are happy with their isolation, content with how it is since departments have a mandate to deliver the curriculum by the Ministry:

It's like the captain trying to turn around the Titanic when it's halfway to the iceberg, you know, it takes a long time. If ever. We may crash. (laughs)

(Head of Department)

The Curricula on Offer
The school through its major departments offers a bewildering variety of courses. They are set out for students in general terms in a brochure (appendix ....) with departments generating their own more detailed brochures and booklets. The first curricular impression is one of 'plenty', 'choice' and 'variety' - there is a sense of a profusion of possibilities. Teachers generally, with a few exceptions, talk enthusiastically about the school, its variety of experiences, people and courses. Taking a journey around the school (photo trails 1 and 2) leaves the visitor with a sense of being overwhelmed. This feeling is as much a part of the curricular possibilities on offer by the school as the written texts. The texts, the talk, the imagery of great automotive shops, exciting art rooms, TV studio, business rooms equipped with checkout counters, networked computer rooms, a grand auditorium - the list goes on. As many teachers said, there is enough on offer for anyone to find something of interest.

From the choice of courses offered the student begins a personal journey within the school. The journey is composed of the actual actions, interactions, conversations, projects and assignments undertaken. Thus curriculum for a given student and teacher is revealed by the way it is talked about and practised, the kinds of interactions that they have with each other and with peers. The journey, however, is not just any old journey. It is steered. It is steered conceptually through what has been called the 'architexture' of the school. What is on offer in terms of 'journeys' is not a static menu but is itself continually in the process of change. Not only are students on a journey but also staff are on a journey which is undergoing a change in terms of its aims, methods and processes. Curriculum essentially, therefore, designates a state of transition or transformation. As an initial set of choices, the official curriculum options consist of:

• the courses offered by each department

◊ academic
◊ vocational

These can be delivered in a variety of ways:

• specialist teaching: 'transmission', 'co-operative group work', project work
• integration of discipline areas
• co-operative education
• work experience
• simulations, work-like experiences

Often these forms of delivery overlap.

The curriculum is not just the initial choice of courses but the way in which experiences in following given courses are organised both formally and informally. As already discussed, there is a move from hierarchical modes of organisation towards 'flatter' forms of decision making. The modes of delivery arise because of the transition. There is essentially a move from 'transmission' approaches which are essentially hierarchical, to cooperative and project group work which depend upon discussion, teamwork and individual responsibility.

The principal in his conversations with me, was clear that teacher centred approaches were wrong. He provided the image of the teacher moving off-stage to the sidelines to act only as a facilitator. He said, in the teacher centred approach it would be the teacher who worked hard all day and crawled exhausted home, 'That's the wrong way round.' He objected to all the talk in the techer centred approach being about teaching rather than learning.

'Ownership' is a key organising theme in bringing about the transition. It is a concept widely employed to explain strategies related to learning, building trust, and building relationships at all levels throughout the school. To what extent is such a term merely a cover for covert control, that is, getting the student to do what the teacher wants under the guise of giving the student the choice? For example, in the area of special needs (Learning Resources) ownership is employed as a key structuring concept when compiling information to develop learning strategies for particular students:

we have what we call a strive to statement. Uh so the student has some ownership for this. And then there's a generalised resource comment from ourselves, plus we let the parents have some ownership, we give the parents a copy of this.

In one sense the deck of cards is already stacked. What can the student do other than strive to meet goals approved by the school? In another sense, it is an act of negotiation that can key into the students' own dreams and ambitions and in this way genuinely begin a process of empowerment and transformation to meet goals that are as much desired by the student as by the school.

Integration and the search for common skills. The notion of ownership can be applied to Ministry guidelines in a way which steers the staff in directions desired by the school's administrators:

How do we deliver this stuff, that's what you wanna know eh? .. First of all you gotta getta, you gotta get the staff .. and that's what I'm working on now, the back end of a project, to get the staff to stop thinking content and to think skills and attitudes, the affective domain and and rather than the cognitive process and then ask themselves, which part of the course could I use in content to best introduce or reinforce um or go to a different level of skill uh manipulation with my kids. And the one, the parts of the course that are repetitive or that aren't essential for understanding other parts of the course in a in a cognitive sense, you get rid of. So that you start with the ministry and you say you work with a broad area, like Western civilisation and then I ask myself OK what do I want my kids to be able to do as well as to know. And that .. that's the approach. N' That's the first stage, is if you can get a staff thinking that way. It implies that each staff member will have their own course of study if if there are two teachers teaching the same course, it implies that they will likely do different things differently. They might choose different topics to work with the same skill. So if you do a French Revolution for example, the the two teachers will not do it, in that teaching sense, the same way. And that does not concern me as long as both of them are asking each other are we common in the kinds of skill experience we're giving the kids and the conceptual experience: what is revolution? Does revolution have a pattern? Now that's a historiography kind of question, it's a philosophical kind of question. But if they agree to do that, then both of them do it. How they do it is up to them. And what I'm working on is is asking my staff to put together their own course of study, that's theirs, you know, with their name on it. So if people ask, what are you doing? They refer to their own stuff.

(Head of Academic Department)

The Department Head goes on to consider the curriculum interpretation strategies appropriate to another key academic programme which again steer courses in particular directions:

.. The other thing that would be a factor is the English programme. And again it varies from school to school, so what I have to do is learn what's going on in the English programme at that level of teaching so that I'm, I'm complementing the programme rather than competing with the programme. And once you find that out then you make some more adjustments. So that's why a course, that's why courses of studies would be, you know, quite individualised even though they are in the broad context, and even though they are following Ministry content and Ministry guidelines for what kinds of skills and what kinds of conceptual things you're going work with, 'cos they give us that. We're not working..necessarily in a .. in a vacuum. And then I, the other thing you take into account is the kids you've got this semester. You know what are their experiences, what are their strengths, what are their weaknesses, do you need to spend a little more time in in research skills because these kids are pretty weak in it. Or have they got a good basis so that you you spend the time say in, in uh problem solving skills. Or source, you know, getting them get them to evaluate sources of information. So you make that little adjustment too depending upon the needs of your your individual class. So you know you've started with Ministry and then you work down to the system and then you work down to your school and the you work down to the needs of your kids.

(Academic Head of Department)

At a variety of levels within the organisation - at senior administrative levels, departmental committee levels, and interaction between teacher and student - activities are being steered according to a dominant discourse. The dominant discourse, as has already been described, is modeled upon a business management discourse which has as its aims the transformation of working relationships from a hierarchical to a flatter de-centred model of decisionmaking and team work. There is a supposed harmonising of educational work practices with those of business workpractices that students are presumed to need. With this kind of thinking strict academic boundaries begin to break down. Process begins to take precedence over content leading to a search for what is common between traditional academic divisions. This was explained by one teacher as follows:

I think the thing was driven .. in the 60s, 'cos I started doing the, sort of process in the 60s .. by the knowledge explosion. And anyone who's really giving it any thought .. stands back, sooner or later, and says, 'Is this worth knowing?' .. And .. the answer to that y' you don't know. Especially when you're working with kids who are gonna live in a different world that you're gonna look at. So one of the supplementary questions I think that comes out of it is, 'Well, if I needed to know it, how could I find it?' ... Which is a process oriented question rather than a content oriented question. And so you're thinking, Well, maybe one of the gifts you can give kids, which you teach is the know-how, rather than, knowing that Hitler had a moustache, if they could find out for themselves if they ever needed to know that, OK. Because what was important for me to know -and I had a, I had a content driven education for most of my career until I went to university - that content is only useful to me, it's not useful to the teenager today, 'cos it was a world now called history, rather than contemporary. So you start to think about that kind of process and you think well OK now what's worth knowing how to do and you start with a list. Some of them are very basic skills: reading, writing, uh, knowing the difference between a noun and a verb, know the difference between, you know, an explanation and a description. But they're fundamental and so you started to ask your kids, you know, when you read this history book do you know whether the guy's telling you this, or is he describing it and who is this guy? So you start to qu', you start to enquire about the nature of your information.

Thus in concrete terms, learning to make notes and handle information becomes of central importance:

So now you got two functions for a notebook: making sure it makes sense to you when you write it down - and that might not be the way the teacher writes it on the board; and secondly, are you organised enough to be able to find it? So you teach the whole concepts of major headings, minor headings, indexes, uh, contenting. And that's what you test for. And of course time is there, the customer is waiting for you to find the part that goes on the axle and 'you're looking under Buick, when he's got a Chevvie? No.' So research skills are all part of it too. What is it I need to know to get me to the data I want?

(Academic Head of Department)

The traditional virtues of memorisation are down played with the increasing need in all subjects to be able to handle vast quantities of information. Of more importance than what a student knows, is whether a student can find out what is needed to be known. Since research skills are in a sense common to all subjects, and since language skills, calculational skills and so on melt together in project work 'integration' as a curricular dimension assumes importance. The current department structure - 'the whole concept, breeds isolation' - is antithetical to the needs of integration.

Broad based technology provides a major illustration of the drive towards integration within the school:

And the idea with broad based technology is to offer ah tech in a lighter way, not so intense theory wise, uh more hands on and they wanna involve all the so-called academic students who don't take tech normally and just give them a brief spattering of plumbing, electricity and woodworking. In fact the projects, and it's a project orientated uh model, the projects are the biggest part of it and they should involve 2 or 3 or 4 areas in the school. So the kid would build a wooden house and he'd put plumbing in that wooden house and he might get electricity going to it as well so it involves all the sciences.

Although departments within the technology area more immediately lend themselves to integrated work, efforts are made more generally to move in such directions. Generally speaking, it is considered that changes in the technology area are for the good of education and country 'we'd better do it' because 'the good students are not coming to technology education. I guess that's the bottom line'.Co-operative education is a second major thrust. The school is rightly very proud of its strong links with local businesses. Through cooperative education courses are constructed which involve work experience in relation to course work. In the school's Business Studies Program brochure it is described as:

The Ministry of Education is encouraging Ontario Secondary Schools to provide more opportunities for students to experience the business world first hand. (The school's) Business Cooperative Education Program - Transition to Employment - allows the student to apply knowledge and skills acquired in the classroom in a real life employment situation. At the same time the student will broaden those skills and acquire new ones on the job.

The Transition to Employment Course is offered to grade 12 students in:

• Accounting
• Computer Studies
• Marketing
• System Support
• General Business

It is a two credit course where a student spends one-third of the time in class and two-thirds of the time working in a business.

The Cooperative Education Program is a unique experience offering many positive features and a valuable alternative to full-time class instruction.

One senior teacher explained why he was in favour of developing such courses as follows:

For two reaons. One we get to, teacher gets to know the students and can find the most appropriate placement for them, and we give them their pre-service or their orientation package, which is a whole programme we have to cover with them such as the you know, job safety and resumé writing, attitudes in business, work uh habits, ethics they do, we have guest speakers in, who talk to them about working on the job. So we try to give them a complete job you know orientation before they go out. And then they have some selection, they work with the teacher on, in the type of placement they would like. And the teachers have a bank of businesses that will take our students. So that's worked out with the student. And then the expectation is that they spend three hours, um, four days a week in the business environment and they come back every monday for reflective time. So the teacher is here monday with a programme where the students get to share their experiences, the good points, the bad points. And that's looked at as very important part of the programme. Um and the teachers get to find out if there's any real problems, any issues and we, again we have guest speakers and other projects that the students have to do during that period of time. Um, the other four days when they're out on the job, the teacher's responsibility is to get out in the work place and visit the students, you know, on a regular basis, talk to their supervisors and their employers.

Um, it's very important when selecting sites, that the sites selected meets the requirements of the Ministry of Education because the student is still under, technically the jurisdiction of the teacher. Even though the job site and the employer is helping us, the the the teacher is still monitoring the programmes. So if a prospective company phoned up and said 'We'd like a coop student for the afternoon, we have to be careful that the employer isn't just looking for slave labour, or cheap labour. Um there has to be um a profile, a job profile drawn up that would be done before hand by the teacher and the employer before a student ever went out there. In other words the teacher has to be assured that the placement is an educational experience for the students. And that has several criteria to it. One is that, the employer see the teacher as still the main .. p' person in the process. And that there has to be a variety of jobs that that student works through. They can't have them for example, 4 days a week, 3 hours and afternoon licking envelopes, or working on one piece of equipment. The teacher has to be assured that when working in the business there are a variety of job functions over a period of time that that student will work through, because otherwise it's not educationally sound to the student. The final mark is made up really of three elements. One, the teacher's evaluation, the employer's evaluation and the students do a self evaluation. And those three parts are brought together by the teacher and um, that's how the student gets their final mark. They also get a mark separate for the in-school versus the out of school component. So, technically a person could fail one part of that and still get their credit in the other. Now it doesn't happen very often but there may be circumstances that that would happen

Cooperative education, like other forms of curricular processes carry values, promote attitudes and forms of conduct that comprise the hidden curriculum:

They learn more than hard skills, they're using their hard skills but it's the soft skills, as I call them, that are important: their dress, their attitudes, their speech.

Cooperative learning and cooperative education. Cooperative learning represents a way of students working with each other. It is not to be confused with cooperative education which involves courses constructed in relationship to employers. However, cooperative learning tends to be a feature of the new approaches to curriculum delivery. for example, in the innovative, new and expanding area of dance, cooperative learning was seen as natural. The school saw itself as a pioneer in this. Ministry guidelines were only provided in 1991:

I started as one grade 11 course in contemporary dance which does um history of dance, dance injuries, dance technique in modern, ballet, and jazz, um dance composition and um performance. Then I have a grade 12 course that is a continuation of that, now a' another grade 12 contemporary. Now I have a second grade 12 course that's called choreography and performance where they choreograph and then they perform. And, they continue on their technique, they have to do a study of contemporary dancers. My history units go um in grade 11 they start them, pioneers of modern dance, in grade 12 they go into more abstract um issues, history of dance, back to ballet and back to pre-Christian and so on and then the choreography students they do contemporary dancers which are much harder to research. We are, I don't know who else has one of these but we have just been granted last week an OAC in dance here.

Cooperative learning is not accepted as being for all subjects. For example, in maths cooperative learning only operates in a few classes, most in the department are traditional. It was explained that maths is tied to a very tight curriculum. Since cooperative working has an experimental feel it was considered that one could not waste a day trying something that did not work. Indeed, he was not sure cooperative learning was the direction he wanted to go in. He employed its methods perhaps twice a month. However, as regards cooperative education there was no example of its use with maths in London. Again he personally he did not see it as the way to go:

From what I hear about some of the coop, some of the a' areas of coop it's just a kid going out maybe in phys ed and he ends up working in a sporting goods shop. To me there are benefits there (..?..) in mathematics I would not want to put somebody out uh into a place where they're just sitting there doing the cash everyday. I can see that maybe in a business area but not in mathematics.

Real product/process curricula. There are a range of activities carried out which point to what may be termed a 'real product or process' curriculum. That is, the emphasis is upon doing real jobs:

I have one kid making a solar collector for a swimming pool. So he designs the swimming pool out of fibreglass, gets a little pump from a windshield washer of a car, he builds his solar collector, gets some plexiglass over it uh pumps coloured water from the pool through the collector back to the pool. So he's into the pumps, the electricity part of it, the fibreglass forming and of course the plumbing end of it. I just find kids, if you can challenge them with a lot of things they, they just love it. You know, when you keep things narrow and slim they go through the motions but .. no excitement there. You know, motivation's gotta be the key to everything, you know, without that we won't have the kids stay long. We might get 'em here, but they won't stay.

and again:

I think the more uh responsibility you give a kid, the more he can handle it. And uh, I step out on limbs everyday I suppose around here. What I have my senior kids do is go to homes, through the day, during their plumbing time here and do some plumbing. And there's no shortage of customers, you know, the teachers here alone are a big bank of customers. But the jobs we've done in the last year and the kids have taken more pride out of that than anything I could ever do to them. And they did a solar collector for the vice principal. We've done, uh we hooked up about a $100,000 machine in the printing department that, uh develops negatives.

It is not always possible to generate real jobs in this way. However, it is still possible to use the city as a curriculum resource. Because 'it's going to get tougher' - smaller budgets, bigger classes etc - people will need to be more imaginative in trying to develop this sense of realism. Therefore he takes a class on a 'field trip' just by walking to nearby building sites to watch the work in progress . They do not go on the site, they observe from a distance. However, this is sufficient to generate discussions. A range of subject areas in Art, and in Business Studies seemed to lend themselves to a sense of the city as curriculum.

In Business Studies the notion of real activities was expressed to me during the second photo tour when the computers in use were pointed out to me as being 'industry standard' with the latest software. Moreover, he would use some students to do his and other HoDs secretarial work because 'it's real, it gives them someone else to respond to other than just the teacher.' These kinds of echos were everywhere in the vocational settings. The cars were up to date models, the print and design departments had industry standard computers, the business studies department had real working checkout counters, a shop and networked computers. I was told about plays the drama department had put on in which the teacher had choreographed a dance. She spoke of the great commitment it required. Although the plays led to pressure they also brought people together - for example, textiles did the clothes, building construction did the set construction.

The broadcast facilities of the school also presented another example of real processes and products. Although I did not have the time to arrange interviews, its products were clearly visible on the television in the principal's room and another in the resources area. Staff were proud that graduate students had been taken up by companies in the USA.

Another important area to mention is that of the nursing studies. The course requires students to gain practical experience in clinical areas. The course takes a range of students, often mature. Again, it is the reputation of the school and its course that attracts them:

student 2. (The teachers) push. They have certain expectations of you that they expect you to meet and uh, they push you. They want you to do well. They want you to excell which is good, 'cos in colleges you don't see that. They, they, you know, they don't care if you're at class or not. You know they don't care how well you do as long as they're getting paid, they don't really care, whereas here they uh
student 1. they care
student 2. (The school) has a reputation to uphold. I mean we hear that constantly. You, you know you're Grey you're the best. You have to go in

Social Curricula. What a teacher earlier had called the soft skills can be seen to form part of what may be called the social curriculum. Again, this may manifest itself as a part of the hidden curriculum, its values and objectives being more implicit than explicit in the text of the course itself. The values are made explicit through the discourse employed everyday by the teacher in face to face relationship with students:

If I had to put a priority on what we're really here for, it's to shape kids attitudes. You know, and uh, I don't believe the knowledge end of it is all that important. I'm not trying to downplay it, I'm just saying that uh .. when we get get kids graduating grade 12 plumbing, there's just one example, uh they'll get on a job site and they don't transfer a lot of that stuff. You know, classroom's one thing, job site's another. And I have kids on co-op and I have feedback from their employers and I really find out that, this transference is difficult. And it takes another four years as an apprentice to really get and, to the point where they can call themselves a journeyman plumber. You know, I'm a firm believer in education and all that but I think it's more important with the social and the uh .. you know, the kid's make up, his personality, his attitude his .. behaviour, his attendance, his dedication to duty, loyalty to employers and all those things I push everyday.

The social curriculum, however, goes beyond the implicit values of a given course of study. It arises in particular when the taken for granted, or conventional codes of conduct are broken:

let's say there's a problem in the classroom but it's not that major but the kid really shouldn't be in the classroom because the teacher and the kid are just not getting along. So, usually there's a a problem, there's a reason why this has happened. So I have a team of 40 people that have volunteered for this TBY process. And what they do is, they, they first, they had a workshop in how to handle their selves in this process. What they do is they go to the TBY room, for, each person goes in for a period of two weeks. And they stay in that room during a certain period. If any kid is sent down there, the kid is sent down with a form saying what they did wrong. Or what the problem was. It's up to the teacher to sit with the kid and say 'well what can we do to solve this problem?' And after that the kid is usually sent back to class. So that's another one of those structures that I was talking about too.

As has been discussed the curriculum is oriented towards a particular vision or imaginative grasp of the political economy. Parallel to this is a view of the student and the role of the curriculum in moulding the individual towards the vision. Behaviours, values, attitudes and so on come to be defined as problems in relation to the extent to which the student moves in approximate ways towards realising the vision. The role of the teacher thus comes to be defined within this process:

.. there's um, there's a principal in town who when he talks to his staff, he says first of all you are school teachers and secondly you are subject teachers. And I think that's true. So much of what many of the students remember about schooling, are the things that are not necessarily classroom related but how they were treated. How people help them with certain issues.

Central to the strategy is the image of the student that the teachers hold. One major image is that of youthful energy and volatility:

Oftentimes though you know when you're dealing with 14 year olds and 15 year olds and 16 year olds and uh, they've, they're running on hormonal energy rather than intellectual energy sometimes. And I don't mean that as a slight, that's just the way it is. OK? That uh their emotions carry them away. I think I can get documented proof of that (Laughter). But in those kinds of cases um sometimes the best thing to do is 'Hey, you don't, you don't see this person, you don't see that person. And never the twain shall meet. In a large school like (this one) you can do that. In smaller schools it's more difficult. And often times if, if we have to we'll get parents involved. Uh try to get as many people helping with the problem as possible. That's what we're trying to do and again, you know it's consitent with , with the main goals, which, one of the main goals of course is decision making.

Empowerment through decision making carries the risk that the student may decide in ways that are not intenendeed by the school. It could be argued that the decision making structures set up by the school are organised in such a way to socialise or persuade the student to decide positively for a particular range of goals. There is a sense of a socially produced consistency the politics of which is focussed upon dealing with 'youthful energy' and shaping those energies through all the processes of 'helping with the problem'. It is an approach consistent with the entrepreneurial metaphor underlying the major administrative discourses of the school.

Alongside such discourses are those of professional development which seek to raise awareness of many issues which concern staff. It is an approach which goes some way towards breaking through the surface to reveal the hidden discourses which frame the social experience of some young people.

My eyes were really opened a year ago when we talked about family um, violence in the family and how many kids have had to deal with that. I think I was really certainly naive about that in terms, I mean, I knew it happened (...) They ran a programme here that, a whole school programme on family violence. And they brought in um counsellors and facilitators from outside the system. We saw a presentation by Peter (Jaffey?) and um people from the women's shelter e' in the auditorium. Everybody saw it. Then they went back to their classrooms and they talked with their teacher and a facilitator about the whole issue and. Um, out of 21 children that I had in class that day, teenagers, um 14 talked to me about some sort of incident of violence in their background. And uh, a couple came to me afterwards and then, so you're up to 16. And now you think, how many chose not to say anything? Um also at the age that theyre at the 'woe is me age' sometimes, you don't know whether some of it is exaggerated or maybe they've taken little incidences that, that were really not .. you know, traumatic or something and have built them a bit more. But I'd say a substantial amount have been through traumatic things.

The teachers who talked about this event were in agreement that it was important although some felt that more practical strategies would have been useful. Nevertheless, it represents a brave and important development. It is part of an on-going programme of life skills:

We're going to do a wider programme that'll go through the life skills, it's being initiated by the phys ed but it'll go through the life skills programme and that's on um, a sexuality fair, you know. They have at th', the middlesex health unit has a sexuality fair and a drug fair. So they bring it in they set up your gymnasium, or a cafeteria or whatever, with all the slides, little films, all different sections, posters and they bring in nurses and they, public health nurses, and the kids tour through this. And it generates discussion.

Creating The Personal Vision: Risk, Change and the Entrepreneurial Curriculum
The entrepreneurial model engenders and is engendered by a particular kind of political economy, that which values the market economy and its presumption of individualism on the one hand and images of service, employer-employee relations of command and decision making on the other. At the heart of the entrepreneurial model of the curriculum is the self as a decision maker, taking a risk and taking the responsibility while at the same time being a team player with all the values and attitudes of conforming to expectation that that implies. Perhaps what has shifted in the entrepreneurial model is downward locus of decision making. Where the nineteenth century view was that decision making was reserved for the highest echelons who deployed employees within patterns of division of labour in the promotion of standardisation, the late twentieth century view is to flatten hierarchies, integrate activities and promote variation. This promotes a sense of personal risk as one becomes increasingly responsible for personal decisions within the corporate whole. It is a risk that impacts upon the teacher:

... the risk can manifest itself in so many different ways. if you have a group of students for example that have um, are used to a certain style of learning, maybe the risk is to attempt to show them another style of learning, you know, and that's a risk. Uh, a risk in terms of um not being afraid to be creative with the material in any way shape or form. I don't know whether this is good or bad, but I always found myself that if I was going to be enthused about teaching I had to enjoy the material itself and I had to say 'yeah, this is going to be interesting to do'.

Both success and failure are personalised thus enhancing the risk yet at the same time defining the individual as the citizen thus linking both the individual and the societal. It is a total process, a process without margins, without let up:

.. The most important thing in any school is, is the learning .. in the classroom, in the hallway, whatever the case is, the focus has to be on learning, and developing and saying to you, you know, 'little Johnnie, OK? have I got a deal for you? You're going to be here, we're going to teach you these things. And these things are going to be important to you in your life, as a citizen of this country, as a citizen of this city, as an individual. OK? as a successful person. And success doesn't have to mean how much money you make, you know or what kind of home you live in or what car you drive. That's the materialistic aspect of success. Success is, what kind of person are you? Are you making decisions that help you, the society, the country and all those kinds of things? Or are you making decisions that hinder? OK? And what we wanna do is have whole people

Essentially, the task involves handling the contradictions that arise in the system. symptoms or signs of the contradictions arise as 'decisions that hinder', or 'youthful energy', 'hormones', 'problems'. Each such contradiction points to a counter discourse or contra-diction. The resolution offered is that of the 'successful' self. The metaphor which drives the curriculum is internalised as a course of instructions which frame decision making and conduct in the construction of the image of the successful self:

But the process is one that I'm really excited about because we talk about ownership. Whose problem is this? 'Well it's your problem, not my problem? OK? So what's your problem?' And then you go through 'what's your problem?' and ' Alright now, did you make a good decision or a bad decision? Why did you make a bad decision?' It's amazing with a lot of our students, once they key in to that kind of problem solving they will solve a lot of problems, before .. it becomes a major difficulty.

The principal speaks of the way he articulates his personal vision. It is about building up confidence, building personal relationships and demonstrating in a simple way the worth of the student, particularly those who have least opportunities:

Um, we have group sessions where um I give some notice to this, call to their teacher and say, 'Get these ten kids in here. They're high risk kids. An' wh' we'll just sit around and have lunch and build up some trust whatever and do some things like that. That's another thing. We recognise student achievement. And I'm not talking about the top students necessarily. So we'll have them for a luncheon up in the apartment, 30, 40 kids. Just say 'Look, you done well in math', and some of these kids first time they're ever patted on the back in their lives. An' we all need that, uh 'have a hamburger or whatever and we, I just want you to know that was important, good for you' and of course this oh heck the parents I suppose, 'this is the only nice thing I've ever heard about my kid in my life'. And that works ... the idea that we all need a pat. (...)

To explain his particular vision he recounts something of his own biography:

It's the disappointing thing to me about it all here at this place which you probably.. I could go, three blocks down and I would say, 'education's fine to me. Look at these kids work.' The disappointing thing to me here, the main thing is the lack of motivation of kids, some kids, and the low parental expectations. Just football, it doesn't ma', just using that example, one of the best players in London. Look I played football and I played professional. And you know, it could've been the music department, I don't care what it is. But the only reason I went to school was to play. I didn't give a shit about school. I, I liked it alright, But I was there to play foo', to learn and play, and go on to university and play. Our best player, and there's more, more like him, we took him off the role 'cos he just wouldn't go to class. Now that makes me sick. Now that's my value and I know that, like. As I say, I don't care if it was the music or the drama. But if, if we offer certain activities and we say get involved 'cos it'll help you - some of us believe those things - the kid says 'Yeah, I wanna play but I don't wanna go to school.' I just feel we've failed, he's failed. So where was the hook? There wasn't any hook there.

It is this that seems to represent the limit to the vision, the point at which it fails. Without the 'hook' there is no reason to play the game. The desire is that people 'buy into' the vision. What other kinds of vision are there on offer? The students have access to alternative discourses describing visions of the future and their place in society. Some of these come from the voices