Abstract Ongoing tension surrounding values education in both the wider community and among politicians and academics, as well as the plethora of values education programs on the commercial market, all contribute to a number of competing values education discourses that can make it difficult for individual classroom teachers to make choices regarding what and how to teach values. The aim of the current study was to contribute to an understanding of discourses of values education in Australia and investigate the way in which the Discourse models of government policy documents and classroom teacher Discourse models of values education intersect in terms of both alignment and fragmentation. In addressing the problem of how teachers choose to bring clarity to competing values education discourses, this research comprises two parts. The first part is an analysis of a key policy text, the National Framework for Values Education in Australian Schools (2005). The second part focuses on fourteen interviews with seven primary school classroom teachers conducted at different times during one school term. Each teacher was interviewed twice. The interviews were treated as objects of analysis and not just as an information source. The informal theories that underpin the policy and interview texts are analysed through James Paul Gee’s (2005) lens of “Discourse models”. This is a critical discourse approach to analysing a social phenomenon, with analytic focus placed on the language in the texts, as well as the localised and broader social context in which the language is situated. The way in which the policy and interview texts functioned strategically was analysed. The Discourse models evident in the texts were then identified through the use of ‘storylines’ as an analytic tool. In identifying Discourse models, insight was gained into how the official policy and the teacher participants in the study conceptualised values education. Analysis of the policy document showed how the text acted strategically to build legitimacy and the appearance of consensus surrounding the approach to values education advocated in the document. The storyline that emerged was one of the Australian Federal Government as a ‘hero’ intervening in values education to save young people who are at moral risk in the 21st century. Analysis of the interview transcripts showed how these texts also acted strategically to build legitimacy and the appearance that each participant’s approach to values education was right, normal and needed. A similar storyline emerged in the interview texts, where young people were in need of rescuing due to the moral peril of current times but it was the teacher participants who were now in the role of ‘hero’. The teacher participants in the study showed that they called upon a multiplicity of social roles, everything they were as moral beings, in their efforts to rescue students. The results indicate that there is both alignment and fragmentation in the Discourse models identified in both the policy and interview texts. Values education was conceived of in largely behavioural terms, where values were fixed, and change towards these value norms was focused on the individual behaviour of the student. Alignment centred on a dominant ‘salvation’ story in the texts that regarded values education as a way to rescue students from moral peril. This master model of the salvation story was fractured, however, by the experiences of the classroom teachers in the study. Most poignant was that not all students were able to be rescued despite the best of professed intentions. There are several implications emerging from these findings. First, the explicit move towards fixed values norms has exclusionary effects. Second, the focus on changing the behaviour of students as individuals ignores systemic levels of oppression. Third, and overall, the didactic teaching of values creates tensions over the perceived interference of the state in the lives of young people. Recommendations emerging from the study include that teachers be given increased opportunities to become more aware of their own values systems, the impact of these in the classroom; and develop their understanding of the broader social structures in which values education in classrooms is situated. This awareness is a necessary complement to the official discourses of values education in Australia in order to mitigate the potential exclusionary effects of policy. 130105 Primary Education 35%, 160506 Education policy 35%, 1399 Other Education 30%
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/285977 |
| Creators | Dana Anders |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Detected Language | English |
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