Politics and pedagogy: a case study in appropriation

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Abstract
Using an interpretive approach, this article examines the career of a major government initiative, Curriculum Organization and Classroom Practice in Primary Schools: A Discussion Paper, from inception to implementation. The document, launched in 1992, aroused spirited and sometimes acrimonious debate in the press, and among politicians, educationists and teachers. The widely differing interpretations of the paper are seen as products partly of differing interests and partly of the different contexts and phases the paper went through. These consisted of contexts of general influence; opportunity and initiation; text production; immediate reception; mediation; and implementation. These contexts fall into two broad stages: the political, when the policies of the ‘New Right’ dictated the course and reception of action; and the educational, when the document was mediated into practice through the LEA (showing ‘strategic leadership') and head teachers (acting as ‘gatekeepers') and appropriated by classroom teachers. Among the factors affecting the meaning and interpretation of the document were the selection of the authors, the time‐scale, the terms of reference, the status of the paper, and the conflicts and compromises of production. Political and educational interests were inextricably involved at certain junctures, coming to a head in the immediate reception phase when the media engendered a discourse of derision and a number of myths, inducing a moral panic about educational standards and ‘progressive’ teaching methods. A number of issues are highlighted in this event, including the ‘career’ of policy initiatives during which their usages and meanings undergo change, often considerable; the way different interest groups interpret them, using different discourses to imbue sense to, rather than take sense from, them; the purposes and control of the dissemination of educational research; and the experimentation with and consolidation of new roles by various agencies and personnel in the new educational order.

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