Conference Agenda

‘Open schooling’ has become in recent years a burgeoning theme in the discourse on how to rethink education for the 21^st century and transform schools into better, more relevant, and adaptable organizations (EC, 2015; OECD, 2020). The rearticulation of ‘open schooling’ has been spearheaded by recent reports by the OECD (2006, 2020), such as the OECD scenarios for the future of schooling and the European Commission’s (EC, 2015), Science Education for Responsible Citizenship, which underscore the merits of transforming schools into ‘hubs of learning’ by opening school walls, fostering collaborations with the community, and engaging in innovative research. Opening schools to the community and engaging in Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) is claimed to offer students (and society at large) the necessary knowledge, skills and values they need in order to successfully perform in 21^st century societies, and to act as responsibly engaged citizens who are motivated to address a wide range of burning social issues (Sotiriou et al, 2017). This transformative shift in the aims of school organization and curriculum requires a root-and-branch, system-wide, reform (Sotiriou et al, 2021). Open schooling is, therefore, regarded as a sea change reform, a reschooling vision, that is aimed at rearticulating the central mission, goals and curriculum of schools, transforming schools into ‘core social centers’ and learning organizations (OECD, 2020).

The idea that schools need to connect to the community certainly did not originate with the concept of open schooling and can be traced back, at least, to John Dewey. Various recent approaches have highlighted the ethical significance and effectiveness of learning with and for the community for promoting democratic principles and more just schools (e.g., Ishimaru, 2019). The Community Schools literature is an important case in point (e.g. Dryfoos, 2000, Heers et al, 2016), as is the more general school-community partnerships literature (Furman, 2002; Valli et al, 2016). Furman (2002), for instance, highlighted the need to bridge the artificial gap between the school-as-community strand and the school-community-connection strand toward the formulation of a more robust ecological perspective. While developments have been made recently to articulate what ‘open schooling’ means and entails, especially in EC-funded projects, current articulations of open schooling, nevertheless, remain theoretically underdeveloped. Given that systematic discussions on ‘open schooling’ are largely absent from peer-reviewed academic journals and publications, a gap can be identified between recent reform efforts expressed in international policies and reports and rigorous theoretical discourse.

This paper attempts to bridge this gap by engaging in the theoretical development of ‘open schooling’ and the conceptual analysis of the different forms of openness that open schooling entails. If reform efforts are to realize the beneficial impacts expected of them, such efforts must be met with appropriate theoretical rigor. Given the community-based approach to open schooling that is currently advocated by the EC and OECD, the paper proposes to connect the articulation and theorizing of what open schooling means to Furman’s ecological model of school-as-community (Furman, 2002) and to Schwartz’s circular model of universal values (1992). The multidimensional model of school openness that is presented here further expands and conceptually organizes the understanding of what openness means and entails and as a consequence also offers beneficial insights for the implementation and research of open schooling.

Middle leadership is a topic of interest across education systems with a push to find the relationship between leadership and student outcomes (Bento et al 2023: Lipscombe et al., 2023). In Ireland the Department of Education (DE, 2022a, p.10) policy sees ‘leadership and management as inseparable’ and as serving teaching and learning. School leaders are charged with promoting ‘a culture of reflection, improvement, collaboration, innovation and creativity in learning, teaching and assessment, managing the planning and implementation of the school curriculum, fostering teacher professional learning that enriches teachers’ practice and students’ learning and fostering a commitment to inclusion, equality of opportunity and the holistic development of each student’ (2022a, p.15). These are the four standards that are judged to be ‘effective’ or ‘highly effective’ in school inspections.

This paper is focused on the role of the deputy principal in Irish primary and post-primary schools with a particular emphasis on leading within the curriculum space. Deputy principals have been described as leaders of learning or instructional leaders (see for example, Lochmiller and Cunningham, 2019; Shaked, 2023), however, in this paper we focus on leading curriculum making in schools. We did not focus on the measurable impact of leadership on learning or teaching rather how deputy leaders described their role in each of these. Most leadership research focuses on the role of the principal with the empirical research on middle leadership less developed (Tahir et al, 2023; Lipscombe et al., 2023). There is very little research on the range of responsibilities of deputies (Leaf and Odhiambo, 2017) or the critical skills needed for the role (Kumalo and Van der Vyer, 2020).

In this paper we explore the role of the deputy principal in relation to the dynamic processes of curriculum making within the theoretical framework of the ‘multilayered and rich ecologies of education systems’ where ‘layers, activities and actors are intertwined’ (Alvunger et al, 2021, p.275). In the topology proposed by Alvunger and colleagues (2021) the deputy principal is found within the micro layer of the sites, actors and activities. This pivotal layer between the macro (policy makers, agencies including curriculum and politicians) and the nano layer (students, parents, community) merits further empirical exploration. This research explores how the deputy principal acts as an intermediary between the curriculum, principal, parents, students, teachers and community through connecting, translating and at times brokering. Curriculum making is taken to mean ‘a highly dynamic and transactional process of interpretation, mediation, negotiation and translation’ within the complex everyday work of leading a school (Priestley et al, 2021, p.273).

Middle leaders have been described as being pivotal to the successful running of a school (Flemming, 2019) and as impacting directly and indirectly teacher practice and curriculum (Lipscombe et al., 2023). The deputy principal is involved in curriculum making through their work on for example, interpreting curriculum policy, timetabling, teacher allocation to areas of the curriculum, student allocation, leading professional development at school level, managing assessment and feedback for students, communicating with parents/ guardians and advocating for students who need additional supports. They often act an intermediary between the principal and the teachers. Recent discourse on school leadership has emphasised the value of greater collaboration in schools, including ‘distributed leadership’ (e.g. DE, 2022a, 2022b; Hargreaves and O’Connor, 2018). This is evident in the Irish school system with an enhanced middle leadership structure, pointing to the need for this research at this time to inform policy on the role of the deputy principal as a hidden asset in schools.

In this paper, we trace the enactment of Home Economics and Health Education (HE/HE) curricula as narrated in the life histories of Greek-Cypriot primary teachers across six cohorts that correspond to different periods of recent history in Cyprus (late 1950s-2010s), to explore it as emerging amidst sociopolitical and historicized contexts, where both constancy and change are possible. By tracing changes and constants, we highlight how this subject-area has been simultaneously connected to an institutional context as well as broader sociopolitical and economic conditions, which remained constant in envisioning particular types of (elementary) schooling and of teachers as professionals, although of changing modalities.

In its local reiterations and in connection to broader institutional contexts, HE/HE relates to how the spread of mandatory public schooling -- through which curricula were mobilized as a mechanism of modernist governance of populations by nation-states, especially in urban centres -- have been entangled with public health policies (e.g. Ball, 2013) and gendered constructions of the teaching profession (e.g. Llewellyn, 2012). In such contexts of administration and governance, ‘curriculum’ has largely been conceptualized as institutionalized text. These constitute what Doyle names ‘programmatic curriculum’, locating it between its ‘societal’, and ‘classroom/instructional’ representations of curriculum (1992a; 1992b) or between Deng, Gopinathan and Lee’s (2013) ‘policy’ and ‘classroom curriculum making’ because it ‘translates the ideals and expectations embodied in the policy curriculum into programmes, school subjects, and curricular frameworks’ (p. 7).

‘Home Economics’ and ‘Life/Health Education’ have long both been part of the programmatic curriculum in Greek-Cypriot education, as labels used in official policy, curriculum texts, and timetables denoting a specific subject-area (Persianis & Polyviou, 1992). However, the shift in terminology from the former to the latter during the most recent educational reform (which included a curriculum review, evaluation and restructuring in 2010/2015), along with the expansion of the timetables from the last two grades to all grades of public elementary schooling, was designed to mark a shift in its content and approach (Ioannou et el., 2015). Life/Health Education became a subject-area where citizenship content was largely relocated and which gradually, in the context of this most recent educational reform, became the primary curricular space for constructing the ideal citizen, embodied in the notion of the ‘democratic socially responsible citizen’. Construing the concepts of ‘citizenship’ and ‘health’ as inextricably linked, the official texts were found to gravitate towards notions of health, safety, and responsibility, marking a shift from national/ethnocentric (as social or political contents of) citizenship. This was a culmination of sedimented health discourses (intersecting with European and Intercultural Education discourses), infusing relevant curriculum documents over the preceding forty years and enabling the formation of a particular type of ideal citizen: an individual responsible over personal health, work, and consumption, hence also contributing to local and/or supranational labour markets (Philippou & Theodorou, 2018; 2019).

It is the enactment of this programmatic curriculum in classrooms that we sought to trace by focusing, in teachers’ life histories, on their narrations of everyday practices in schools and classrooms during their career overall but also in subject-areas, including HE/HE. In this paper, we illustrate how the school curriculum, through and as pertaining to HE/HE, remained distinct, centrally prescribed and recognizable over the last 60 years, although of changing narrated enactments, marking shifting teacher professionalisms and conceptions of elementary schooling.