Teaching Scotland’s Future: a critical consideration of salient themes

Abstract

Despite the promotion of teachers as enquiring professionals in contemporary Scottish educational policy, it seemed that little attention had been paid to the nature of such policies themselves and what ideological purposes they served to promote. Indeed, while Teaching Scotland’s Future (Donaldson, 2011) had guided developments in Scottish education since its publication (Swinney, 2017a), only three appraisals of the report could be sourced (Kennedy and Doherty, 2012; MacDonald, 2013; Black et al., 2016). This enquiry therefore sought to redress the perceived void in critique surrounding Teaching Scotland’s Future (Donaldson, 2011) and understand the ideological nature of the document. In order to achieve this aim, the researcher conducted a critical discourse analysis focussing on the aspects of the overview of the report that explicitly covered teachers and their role. Research questions were generated covering how the teaching profession was conceptualised in the overview, how this aligned with wider discourses of social organisation and whether such discourses were compatible with the configuration of teaching put forth in theory and research – all of which provided a sharp focus for the study. Subsequently, data was generated by applying the framework of questions suggested by Fairclough (2015) – supplemented by the work of Janks (2010) and Halliday and Matthiessen (2014) - to the overview of the document. This was then combined with findings from a thorough literature review in order to arrive at the conclusion that Teaching Scotland’s Future (Donaldson, 2011) could be viewed as operating in line with a wider global policy discourse of neoliberalism. As such, the study uncovered the possibility that, while aspects of the language used in the overview could be seen to affirm a belief in teacher professionalism and autonomy, its wider grammatical structures could actually be seen to erode traditional understandings of these terms and re-conceptualise them to meet the needs of an economy that required less agency, more passivity and the promotion of homogeny through strict accountability processes. Therefore, while the study focusses on a small section of the wider report, it nonetheless provides interesting insights for teachers wishing to understand more clearly the context in which they practice, and hopefully empowers them to critically question the policies currently governing their professional lives.