(Groundwater-Smith, S., Mayes, E. & Arya-Pinatyh, K.) A bridge over troubling waters in education:...

Curriculum Matters 10: 2014 213

A bridge over troubling waters in education: The complexity of a “students as

co-researchers” project

Susan Groundwater-Smith, Eve Mayes,

and Kadek Arya-Pinatyh

Abstract

“Students as co-researchers” is a mode of engagement between students and teachers in school systems that has been likened to a bridge. This article explores the bridge metaphor with reference to one school’s experience of a students as co-researchers project involving students and teachers in the school and a university partner. We use the bridge metaphor, inspired by the imagist poet Ezra Pound, to explore particular challenges faced in this project, and to envision new modes of teacher/student relationships in education. We argue that the purpose of building such a bridge between students and teachers is not an instrumental one (to reach the other side), but rather that the bridge offers up zones of affective relational encounters between students and teachers.

Introduction[Student voice] breaks the barrier that I think that we have. For example, I know when you first start school, there’s always like, ‘this is the teacher, this is the student’—like a barrier between the two. And having a student voice is sort of the bridge in between that barrier that allows us to connect with the teacher […]— not just, ‘this is how it’s going to be, one way, that’s it’. —Year 11 student

School-based research where students and teachers collaboratively investigate questions surrounding teaching and learning has been championed in recent school improvement literature. This mode of engagement between students and teachers in school systems has been likened to a bridge (Atweh & Bland, 2004; Mitra, 2005, 2006). Sometimes also described as student voice, student participation, and pupil voice,

214 Curriculum Matters 10: 2014

this mode of engagement is argued to interrupt the “normal asymmetries inherent in school relations” (Mockler & Groundwater-Smith, 2015, p. 54), unsettling binary distinctions between student and teacher. As students explore their experiences of schooling, and facilitate research into teaching and learning in their schools, alternative ways of viewing educational experiences are offered to teachers, with the potential to initiate new conversations about teaching and learning (Cook-Sather, 2010).

While the bridges that are built between co-researching students and teachers are frequently celebrated, there is further need for exploration of the complexities of building and maintaining such bridges, and the complex affective work that happens on the bridge. In this article, an academic partner and two teacher-researchers explore the bridge metaphor with reference to a project where students were involved as co-researchers, through a close range engagement with the specificity of the bridge and the enactment of student voice in a particular school context. Metaphors are often used in passing, to illustrate a point. Here, we linger awhile to closely examine the threads and lines at work in the bridge metaphor, and how this metaphor might help us to make sense of our perplexing experiences.

Below, we introduce the context of the project, before elaborating on our rationale for using the metaphor of the bridge. We then examine particular elements of the project through the lens of the bridge: the apparent chasm between students and teachers, building a bridge without a blueprint, zones of encounter on the bridge, the fragility of the bridge, and testing and evaluating the bridge’s structural integrity. Anonymised student and teacher quotations are foregrounded in exploring the bridge metaphor. We are mindful of the current audit climate that requires projects of this kind to be evaluated through narrow accountability metrics. By using metaphor as an illuminative device we are able to examine what occurred in one school qualitatively, with the affective force of imagery.

ContextBefore commencing upon our rationale for the use of the metaphor of the bridge, we turn first to a brief outline of the project. It was established in 2010 in a Sydney metropolitan co-educational secondary school that

Groundwater-Smith, Mayes, and Arya-Pinatyh


A bridge over troubling waters in education

was facing a range of intersecting challenges in relation to economic and social disadvantage (Mayes & Groundwater-Smith, 2010). The first author was the academic partner for the 4 years of the project. The second author was the teacher-researcher facilitating the group in 2010–11, and a doctoral researcher working with the group in 2013. The third author was the teacher-researcher facilitating the group from the end of 2011 to 2013. Funded through the state and federal National Partnership Agreement for Low Socio-economic Status School Communities1 initiative, one of the school’s aims for the students as co-researchers programme was to “reform” a number of its established practices, an important one being the nature of the relationships between students and their teachers. A selection of students (approximately 20) from Year 9 (14 year olds) were “apprenticed” into becoming participant-researchers conducting a “collaborative inquiry” (Bragg & Fielding, 2005) into an aspect of the ways in which the school went about its work over a whole school year. This group became known as “The Steering Committee”—an important indicator of its work, since it had little executive power in the school, but could inform the steering of reform and change.

The focus of the inquiry for 2010 was “The school I’d like”. In 2011 a new cohort of students, also from Year 9, addressed “The teaching I’d like”, while in 2012 attention was paid to “The learner I would like to be.” The last year of the project, 2013, included students from Years 7–11 with an interest in “What I would like to learn”.

The rationale for the work of the project and the process of recruitment, training, and student-led research, analysis, and dissemination each year has been detailed elsewhere (Mayes, Arya-Pinatyh, & Groundwater-Smith, 2013; Mayes et al., 2013; Mayes & Groundwater-Smith, 2010, 2011, 2013). In summary, each year students engaged in a series of research workshops conducted by teaching staff (including the second and third authors) and a university-based partner (the first author). These workshops were organised to serve a dual purpose: to familiarise students with research methods and ethical research principles, and to provide conditions where students could also express their own feelings and orientations to their schooling and investigate those of their peers. Students became competent in facilitating and analysing qualitative, open-ended methods: conducting


focus groups; developing and analysing surveys based upon focus-group findings; using visual methods (for example, photographing aspects of the school environment, choosing a visual image to represent their emotion); constructing scenarios using projective strategies, such as cartooning; and observing and interviewing teachers at work. Students evaluated the utility of particular research methods and moved to increasingly devise their own research questions and adopt the position of interviewers, focus-group facilitators, data analysts, and writers and presenters of their research findings, not only at their own school, but at other schools and other settings (see Mayes, Arya-Pinatyh, et al., 2013 for details).

Student and teacher quotations used in this article come from an ethnography conducted by the second author in 2013, the final year of the project. This study involved participant observation of the group of students who were co-researchers in 2013, focus groups with students previously and currently in the co-researcher group, interviews with teachers and parents, and informal participant observation of “student voice” in the daily life and processes of the school. Institutional ethics approval was obtained from the University of Sydney Human Research Ethics Committee and the NSW Department of Education and Communities (State Education Research Application Process). Informed consent was gained from students, their parents/caregivers, and teachers. All participants were assured that their identities would be protected in accordance with principles of confidentiality (Alderson & Morrow, 2011).

Metaphors as tools for thinking and feeling differently: The bridgeWorking alongside the students in the co-researcher group, we frequently used visual metaphors to facilitate thinking and discussion. The students, as they led their own research with peers and teachers, also used visual prompts to initiate research conversations. Visual elicitation has been widely written about as a research method for children and young people (see, for example, Ali-Khan & Siry, 2014; Groundwater-Smith & Mockler, 2003; Thomson, 2008), as a tool with which they might project their thinking about a particular phenomenon or event. We argue that visual metaphors are not only helpful for younger research participants and



student-researchers, but also assist teacher co-researchers and academic partners to make sense of a complex process. We have been guided by Lakoff & Johnsen (2003, p. 116) when they write:

Because so many of the concepts that are important to us are either abstract or not clearly delineated in our experience (the emotions, ideas, time, etc.), we need to get a grasp on them by means of other concepts that we understand in clearer terms (spatial orientations, objects, etc.).

This project spanned 4 years and involved approximately 100 students as co-researchers who listened to a multiplicity of divergent student and teacher perspectives. Employing metaphor helps us to grasp and articulate some of the more abstract lessons and shifting affective flows between people in a multifarious setting. Our thinking resonates with that of the poet Ezra Pound when he proposes the concept of “imagism”, where the image is understood in the context of the interpretative metaphor. Pound’s (1913) definition of the image was “that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time” (Liebregts, 2004, p. 87). The isolated, concrete image of the bridge allows us to examine the complexities of a 4-year project, providing us a different angle of vision and another way of writing about the challenges faced in encountering the “other” in the school environment. As we focus on particular elements of the bridge, we are enabled to explore the complexity of particular moments in time in the project.

We see the bridge as a bounded object that nevertheless varies in size, composition, structure, and function. The bridge metaphor is flexible, even if we have needed to adjust the type of bridge that we imagine in our minds to convey a certain aspect of the project’s work: for example, from the Sydney Harbour Bridge, to a rope bridge, to an enclosed bridge built to weather storms. A bridge is composed of heterogeneous materials and traversed by diverse parties for different purposes. We connect our work in the 2010–13 project to the bridge metaphor in a variety of ways. Consulting and researching with young people can provide a communicative bridge between the worlds and perspectives of teachers and students, although we will explore the ambiguities of communication below. The gap between students and teachers is unique to each particular relationship: gaps are felt in differences in age, experiences, culture,



ethnicity, religion, gender, and viewpoints. Those positioned at each shore see the waters between from different vantage points, necessitating the building of a physical structure on which to meet. We see the project as occurring on the bridge, in the space between, rather than the aim of the project being to “get to the other side”. Moments where we meet each other on the bridge may be fleeting and temporary, in a half-glimpsed wave of empathy, or parties from disparate groups may linger awhile, face-to-face on the bridge. The metaphor of the bridge enhances understanding of the advances, retreats, and points of stasis that occurred as the various parties (in our case: students, teachers, executive staff, the academic partner) travelled over, back, or avoided the bridge that links the shores of students and their teachers.

We are not alone in finding the metaphor a powerful heuristic in exploring relationships between teachers and learners. The bridge metaphor has been used in more general discussions of teaching, as well as in more specific discussions of the gaps between life worlds and educational institutions. Pomson & Gillis (2010) wrote of the concept of the teacher as “stranger”, a “living bridge” between disparate communities (p. 46). Mitra (2006) has employed the bridge metaphor to describe the potential for student voice to bridge the school and home divide. Bunda, Zipin, & Brennan (2011) use the bridge metaphor to critique equity policies for university entry for Indigenous people, arguing that this is a “one way access” bridge into “an institutional field where the rules of the game have not been made, nor are they substantially transformable by contributions of Indigenous agency” (p. 942), perpetuating existing binary distinctions and cultural deficit models. While relieved of the bridge “tolls”, those attempting to cross this “shaky” bridge find themselves still required to carry their own burdens (Bunda et al., 2011, p. 943). In this article, we also explore the fragility of the bridges between students and teachers, the pressures placed on the student to carry the burden of building and repairing the bridge, and argue for the reciprocal imperative for those in institutional power to listen and engage with the bridge.

A bridge too far? [There is a] fundamental rift or chasm between—Senior Executive teacher, staff development day



Teachers don’t know about me and I don’t know about them—Year 10 student-researcher, focus-group transcript

The above quotations exemplify the chasm felt between the worlds and experiences of students and teachers. Set in categories (“teacher” and “student”) marked by barriers in age, authority, and knowledge, difference was described as a source of conflict between the two groups. One Year 11 focus group that involved students who had previously been co-researchers, as well as students not previously part of the project, likened their experience of verbal conflict in classrooms between teachers and students to a “punch on” (a colloquialism for a physical fight). The Senior Executive member who described the “chasm” on staff development day, asserted that there is not the time for a teacher to attempt to heal or bridge this rift:

The teacher doesn’t have time to counsel and deconstruct and figure out [what the student is thinking]. [Adopting a mock sympathetic tone of a teacher speaking to a student] ‘Come here. What were you thinking now?’ They’re thinking that they’ve got to manage the rest of the monkeys swinging from the fan and get through the content of that lesson.

Time and the demands of behaviour management and curricular content in a large classroom are identified as barriers to even comprehending the possibility of building a bridge. Students respond with withdrawal and resignation to this status quo: “Teachers don’t know about me and I don’t know about them.” These quotations suggest that the chasm between is for some unbridgeable, perhaps a bridge too far.

Building a bridge without a blueprintThe project did not come with an instruction manual. Its essential components were built by the students and the facilitating teacher-researchers themselves. Yet, from the beginning, and throughout, we were aware that there are often expectations of the “type” of person who builds bridges: those with previous qualifications in engineering, and those with experience in building and labouring. We wondered who would be able to, or even want to, build and walk on the bridge? Smyth and McInerney’s (2012) assessment of mainstream schooling as having marginalised, excluded, and failed many young people in spite of them being “the



most salient witnesses of what occurs in schools and classrooms” (p. 3), resonated with us as we analysed and sought to understand the research data. Looking at the relational conditions described in the previous section by students and teachers, it is no surprise that some students may have been skeptical or nervous about the possibility of involvement in bridge-building. This stance was particularly the case for students in the group who previously may not have seen themselves as either eligible or capable of researching school practices (see Mayes & Groundwater-Smith, 2010, 2011).

Since these types of bridges do not come with blueprints, we did not anticipate what would emerge from our work together. So much of schooling is increasingly governed by set outcomes and goals, in ways that are in danger of reducing the flexibility and opportunities for students to take learning in productive directions, if given the space and time (cf. Boomer, 1992). Each meeting, we threaded together the different experiences and standpoints of the individuals within them like the threads of a rope bridge. Indeed, the ropes and the bridge differed in form from the fibres and threads that composed it, resulting in an “object with characteristics distinctive from those of the original ingredients” (Holland & Leander, 2004, p. 134). Towards the end of 2013, in a session reflecting on the work of the students in the 2013 co-researchers group using visual images as metaphors, one student described his choice of an image of a labyrinth-like structure with divergent lines:

These lines aren’t building in any specific direction which means at some point we can all have different questions, [we] don’t have a starting point—these are all a bunch of randoms building something that should be interesting in the end.

The work of the group maintained an exploratory, permanent provisionality, continually and collectively evaluating the group’s progress, with an openness to change directions as the group deemed necessary (Fielding, 2011; Kemmis, 2011). We wanted to maintain the specificity of this place, these individuals, this group, in this time and space. We also knew that the responses of students to our initiating activities would be unpredictable: that students might accept, appropriate, or refuse the offer to build bridges between themselves and with adults



(Mayes & Groundwater-Smith, 2013). We hoped to be receptive to a multiplicity of responses, leaving the blueprint unfinished, open to re-sketching and creative additions. This openness fostered both zones of encounter and troubling interactions.

Zones of encounter on the bridgeIt’s really hard to sit and listen to kids […] when you see it in a different set of terms— Senior Executive teacher, interview

The research encounters that occurred on the bridge were zones where people travelled, met each other, and looked into the eyes of the other, even if momentarily. We saw the bridge as fostering what Bronywn Davies (2014) has described as “emergent listening”, in contrast to the forms of “listening-as-usual” that pervade established practices in schooling. In “listening-as-usual” adults “listen in order to fit what we hear into what we already know” (Davies, 2014, p. 21). Listening-as-usual occurs on the shore, when we do not set foot onto the bridge, and “hear” only the distant utterances of those from the other side with ears to judge, censure, and dismiss. “Emergent listening” involves “the suspension of judgment, letting go of the status quo and of the quotidian lives embedded in that status quo” (Davies, 2014, p. 28), stepping onto a precarious bridge between what we have always known and what might be possible. In a zone where emergent listening might occur, the interlocutors open themselves up to becoming different in interaction with the other, the environment, and emergent thought, “curious about the void in any situation” (Davies, 2014, p. 28). The “void” might be the turbulent waters beneath—that which threatens our mutual engagement with each other. A “double movement” occurs in emergent listening: the void becomes visible—“what was there but invisible in the prior situation” and “one becomes no longer the self one was before” (Davies, 2014, p. 24). Emergent listening, to us, resonates with Fielding and Moss’s descriptions of the “restless encounters” in radical democratic relationships that can nurture “a joy in each other’s being and a greater sense of shared delight and responsibility” (2011, p. 79). We define this “response-ability”, following Ellsworth (1997), as the capacity to respond to the other—to sense, to feel, to be open to respond—in the “rackety



space of difference between—in the indirect and discontinuous routes between self and other, without trying to possess, arrive at, or Know self and other” (p. 163).

Moments of emergent listening were felt throughout the 4 years of the project, though not easily recorded as evidence. These moments occurred in planning our research, in Steering Committee meetings where the facilitating adults and the students spoke frankly about our feelings about teaching and learning. These moments were felt as students engaged in lesson studies, interviewing teachers afterwards and listening to each other’s accounts of the lesson (see Mayes, 2013). These moments were felt as students interviewed their teachers, seeing in the teacher’s written notes and pained facial expressions reactions reminiscent of, but also different from, their own anxieties in public-speaking assignments in front of their classmates. These moments lingered in a student observation of a meeting where history teachers discussed programming for the new Australian history curriculum:

Teacher: For those brief moments when [the students] were watching us, it created connections between teachers and students. You are still aware of them, conscious of their thoughts as you talk: their own thoughts, your actions and how you think in terms of what we were dealing with that day, planning for the programs. I felt that connection was really positive. You couldn’t really absolutely ignore that they were there, and you didn’t really want to: a connection came in. We were moving away from that student/teacher relationship—there was a collegiality between teacher and student—I’ve never experienced it before. We only touched on it but it was nice. (Mayes, Davis, et al., 2013, p. 18)

While we could list other quotations from teachers and students about these moments—apprehending, catching, and fixing evidence of emergent listening—to enumerate and fix these moments is somewhat like asking for an account of the precise conditions that made a chance meeting on a bridge so significant. Accounting for these moments is like trying to re-create a sense of the cool breeze that heartens bridge-builders on a sweltering afternoon.



The fragility of the bridgeWhen we put our heart and soul into this big project and then presented in front of the staff and then the staff to turn around and kind of say, ‘oooh, youse don’t know’—taking on board but kind of not accepting it, […] was a big thing. Teachers were all, ‘we don’t need to do that, it’s not a two-way street, you guys do this and we just teach.’ […] We’ve done all this research, we thought it was going to be good, and then for teachers to turn around and say [that] was a kind of a setback.—Year 11 student, focus group

[Teachers would say] ‘the Steering Committee made you question how to learn or question, or try to do things different ways. Oh that’s what Steering Committee has done to you guys. They’ve given you a big head.’—Year 11 student, focus group

We are wary of triumphalistic accounts of initiatives that involve students as co-researchers that inadvertently suggest that student voice can “bridge the gap” between students and teachers, and that the bridge, once built, is indestructible. There are tensions between the bridge and the shore—pulls in multiple directions that make emergent listening encounters fragile and precarious. The dialogic conditions necessary for thoroughfare and zones of encounter had to be developed, often in contrast to existing school practices. The teacher-researchers facilitating the project and the academic partner agreed that reciprocity and respect were fundamental to creating the opportunities for encounter. However, power/knowledge relations in the school setting beyond the group were somewhat intractable. Indeed, teachers and students seemed to have different conceptions of the purposes of the bridge.

In the early years of the project in particular, a number of conflicts occurred in classrooms following the students’ presentations of their research findings to the teachers. In these classroom conflicts, individual teachers challenged students’ explorations of students’ definitions of “respect” and questioned their research findings. Students were told that they needed to exemplify the qualities of the “good” student for their research findings to be seriously considered—the bridge was to be judged by the willingness of the students to cross to the teacher’s side and become consistently “responsible”. Such appropriations of initiatives involving students as



co-researchers, more about control of student behaviour than about adult listening or relational encounter, have been previously critiqued (Arnot & Reay, 2007; Bragg, 2007; Kehoe, 2013; Lodge, 2005; Robinson & Taylor, 2013). Students who resist such co-options of their work are censured as having a “big head” and not really “know[ing]” what they are talking about. It seemed that for some teachers, the processes of students investigating the conditions of learning were not only unfamiliar, but also alien to their construction of themselves as the principal authority figure in the classroom. We do not think the teachers intended to shut down the students, or “listen-as-usual”. But perhaps it was the “unexamined attachments” to their own status quo affective or psychic investments as teachers (Davies, 2014, p. 28)—to their own sense of self-as-teacher, their own immanent fears—that interrupted the possibility of further relational bridges being built in classrooms. Like a drawbridge, teachers were able to raise the bridge when threatened, rendering the bridge a dangerous zone for students. Students were expected to respond in a particular way to these provocations: to remain calm and diplomatic when their research was questioned. This attitude was not always possible. Cords carefully wound together to form the bridge were in danger of being subtly frayed by the troubled waters beneath.

Testing and evaluating the bridgeTesting the construction of a bridge designed to traverse the troubled waters between students and teachers is not an easy endeavour. However, evaluation is central to accountability-driven reform funding. From a bird’s-eye view, looking for overall form, structure, and utility, we are not sure what other people would make of this bridge. Perhaps, from a distance, this bridge might look more like a tangled growth across waters than like a precisely engineered structure. This “bridge”, or tangled growth, might appear to be constantly shifting and changing, so that any attempt to “capture” an image of the bridge would result in a series of blurry, unsuccessful shots. Perhaps the bridge might appear strange from a distance: a series of bodies stretched and linked over the waters, precariously. Indeed, the intangible affective bridge built between individuals might be imperceptible—it may appear that there is no bridge at all because nothing solid evidences its presence.



Those positioned on the “teacher” shore perhaps imagined that the bridge was about reforming the student. The purpose of the bridge was understood to be to bring students to the “other side” of the teachers’ understanding in a single crossing, rather than about both parties stepping onto the bridge. The effectiveness of the bridge was based on how many students passed to the other side, “understanding” the difficulties of teachers’ work, rather than, perhaps, the quality of encounter on the bridge itself. It is understandable that those not involved in the bridge-building might question its existence or effectiveness.

But at close range, for those standing on the bridge or walking across it, the microfibers constituting it are perfectly visible. In a rope where the threads of individual diverse subjects intertwine, affect also entwines. A productive tension or energy is felt, as others stand on the rope bridge to see if it will hold. One student said, discussing the intangibility of classroom atmospheres:

I think if you were to put three classes in the library and just divide it, put tables, and pretend that they’re teaching something, as soon as you go past that line [where the tables divide the ‘classes’], it feels different. You don’t know why, but it just does.

These intense affective bridges are apprehended corporeally: in the prickle of goosebumps when a previously quiet student speaks, in the flush felt in the face by a student when her idea is recognised and affirmed by other students, at the charge in the air when a “naughty” student and a stern teacher look each other in the eye for the first time. Intangible affective threads between people in a relational encounter leave no visible trace of their composition once the moment has passed (cf. Ellsworth, 1997). At close range, these threads are powerful, strong, and become deeply embedded in memory, impacting on future interactions, relations, and the student and teacher’s sense of self. But these threads are also fragile—strong in the moment, but easily damaged or cut short by what follows (a stammer, a jeering laugh, a phrase uttered by the teacher that re-instantiates asymmetrical power relations after the moment of encounter). As educators and researchers, we seek out these bridges, and seek to nurture and remember what they meant in that moment, and what they might mean now.



However, the bird’s-eye view is privileged in current school reform evaluation procedures. What is measurable exists, and what is immeasurable or intangible is marginalised. In school reform processes, numbers matter, particularly numbers identifiable in standardised test results, attendance figures, or suspension data. Numbers signify success in these logics (Brown, Halsey, Lauder, & Wells, 1997), reducing politics to “managing the everyday”, the “evisceration of a progressive imaginary” (Lingard, 2011, p. 355). Educational outcomes that are measurable are valued, evidenced in particular artifacts: graphs of a child, a school, or a nation’s “value added” performance. Voices of individuals are not necessarily privileged in measuring reform strategies, and affective dimensions are sometimes ignored or dismissed.

The purposes of projects involving students as co-researchers, as rickety bridges, are counter-intuitive to the logics of instrumental reform strategies (cf. Fielding & Moss, 2011; Mockler & Groundwater-Smith, 2015). The bridge is not functional; the chasm between student and teacher is not closed as we meet and encounter one another face-to-face, even though we may sense in these moments fleeting acknowledgement of the challenges that the other faces. Instead, as Ellsworth has described, it is more like we stand “nearby each other” as we gaze out at the waters and ponder what “suspended performances each of us might make” (1997, p. 159). It is on the bridge that we engage with each other and with learning, in a particular time and place, in a particular network of relations.

ConclusionConstructing a bridge between student and teacher is not about the student arriving at an increased sense of “responsibility” as an individual subject (cf. Bragg, 2007). This would be to “arrive” at the other side of the bridge, as a “reformed” individual, set apart from others, internally possessing qualities of responsibility that the student takes with them into a future as an economically productive citizen-worker. Instead, as adults co-researching with students, we propose that projects involving students as co-researchers foster conditions where bridges may be built. On these bridges, where we speak and listen in the “rackety space of difference between” (Ellsworth, 1997, p. 163), “response-ability” may be



performed. This is a collective activity, an encounter in a specific place and time that passes and cannot be replicated on demand. It is an unsteady stance that we hope to remain in as school and tertiary educators—open to responding to others, moment by moment. This unsteady and unsettled stance is, as Readings has said, “an accountability that is at odds with accounting” (1996, p. 165). It is not so much an accountability for the bridge (Where did the bridge go? What was the final product? What outcomes were produced?), but an accountability on the bridge—between us: students, teachers, and researchers.

At the same time, we know that there were “outcomes” that were felt not only in the ends, but also in the process of the group. We know that students facing challenging circumstances in their lives, and who have received deficit messages about themselves, their families, and their communities over a lifetime, may not be engaged easily or in ways that are evidenced in measurable test scores or in suspension or attendance data. Nevertheless, we know there were bridges built between students and teachers because we lived them: we felt them, we walked across them, we nurtured the knots that bound their threads and ropes together. Perhaps, as Anzaldua (1987) says, it is true that “there are no bridges, one builds them as one walks” (pp. iv-v).

The quotations from students and teachers in the 4th year of the project signal that a gap remains between students and teachers, and that work remains to be done to build bridges between disparate teacher and student shores. Our fragile bridge, in the form of the project, sought to foster relational encounters connecting young people with their teachers. But these bridges did not necessarily constitute measurable outcomes. The turbulence beneath the bridge (in some teachers’ troubled reactions) became a focus of attention in determining outcomes. As a result, measuring “outcomes” became about measuring improved student behaviour, rather than about examination of the bridge that had been built as a route to a more fulfilling set of relations. As the academic partner and teacher-researcher facilitators, we continue to desire to build zones where old structures are demolished and new connections are fashioned. But we also know that this is precarious work that involves negotiation of many challenges—organisational, attitudinal, affective, and relational.



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Note1 The Australian federal and state governments signed a National Partnership Agreement on Low Socio-economic Status School Communities in December 2008. This partnership involves a significant amount of additional funding for schools that were identified in “rounds” according to the degree of challenges faced by the school community. The high school discussed in this chapter was included in the first round of funding that began at the beginning of 2010. This funding continued for 4 years: 2010–13.



The authorsSusan Groundwater-Smith is an Honorary Professor in the Faculty of Education and Social Work at the University of Sydney. She was the academic partner facilitating the project that is represented in this article. Susan convenes the Coalition of Knowledge-Building Schools, a hybrid group of schools from both government and independent sectors and a range of cultural institutions. All of these organisations work together under the auspices of practitioner inquiry.

Eve Mayes is a secondary school English/English as a Second Language teacher and a doctoral candidate in the Faculty of Education and Social Work at the University of Sydney. She was a teacher-researcher engaging with the students as co-researchers whose work is discussed in this article. The project is the focus of her doctoral ethnographic research.

Email: [email protected]

Kadek Arya-Pinatyh is a Human Society and its Environment (HSIE) teacher in a secondary school in Sydney. She was a teacher-researcher engaging with the students as co-researchers whose work is explored this article.


mailto:[email protected]

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