This field study is an examination, by a partisan participant
observer, of the Neighbourhood Community Centre and its first year
of operation as the Co-operative Peoples School, in the ACT government
school system.
The Neighbourhood Community Centre was a small, alternative,
independent school for children from three to eight years of age. The
school's philosophy was progressive and its management policies and
structures co-operative and non-hierarchical. For two years, parents
campaigned to become part of the ACT government school system. In
February 1978, the school opened as a government school, with funding
and staffing arrangements similar to other schools in the ACT.
Soon after incorporation, the distinctive attributes of the
Neighbourhood Community Centre began to disappear. Conflict became
the dominant characteristic of the new school: the degree, extent
and duration were extreme for a group that had asserted a commitment
to consensus and co-operation. Two identifiable and, ultimately,
irreconciliable parent factions emerged.
Three factors were linked in the events of 1978: conflict,
ideology and power struggles in a situation of change. These factors
do not easily fit into the dominant sociological paradigm, functionalism,
as an explanation of the events of 1978, for the concept of power has
been, at best, slow to be incorporated into that sociological tradition.
Yet the events, to this observer, were linked to a political struggle
between competing groups for the domination of the school: power was
a major dimension. Only at a superficial level was the conflict
ideological.
Parent factions concealed a third group, the teachers, who
were striving to dominate the school, a domination that was not
accepted unequivocally in the new school. Their ultimate success
depended not on their coalition with a parent faction, the support
of the Schools Office, strategies for isolating criticism and critics
and their professional ideology; their success depended on their
structural power within the school system which provided resources,
support and justification for their position.
This analysis endorses sociological theorists who maintain that
power, and structural power in particular, is a central concern in
organisational life. The failure of the Co-operative Peoples School
was linked to the unequal distribution of power within the co-operative.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/219338 |
| Date | January 1982 |
| Creators | Smith, Libby, n/a |
| Publisher | University of Canberra. Education |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | ), Copyright Libby Smith |
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