Walz, Linda, Haines Lyon, Charlotte ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8341-744X, Bright, Graham, Walton, Joan ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9875-0296 and Reid, Kalen (2023) Unlocking education through relationship building: Discourses of identity and agency in English educational institutions during Covid-19. British Educational Research Journal, 49 (4). pp. 711-730.

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Abstract

This article reports on a longitudinal study in the North of England with educational practitioners in schools, colleges and universities during two lockdowns. The project was designed to ‘unlock’ education by providing spaces to co-create new ways of thinking about education in light of the Covid-19 pandemic. Focus groups were conducted with school and college teachers as well as university staff at the end of the first and second English lockdown, in summer 2020 and spring 2021. A thematic analysis identified issues with expectations, communication and agency, and that participants framed them as impacting on their identity. Therefore, the framework of tactics of intersubjectivity was adopted to explore how educational practitioners discursively positioned themselves and others through constructions of similarity and difference, realness and power, and how their professional identities were affected by the experience of working through the pandemic and by those around them. Whilst educational practitioners took opportunities to authenticate their identity and reimagine education, their agency was undermined by top-down governing involving little successful communication, leading to denaturalising and illegitimising experiences for staff. Executive management were perceived as lacking engagement with staff and understanding of the implications of their decisions on them. The findings call for relationship building and recognition of the voice of educational practitioners.
Keywords: educator identity, authentication, voice, pandemic

Item Type:	Article
Status:	Published
DOI:	https://doi.org/10.1002/berj.3865
Subjects:	L Education > L Education (General)
School/Department:	School of Education, Language and Psychology
URI:	https://ray.yorksj.ac.uk/id/eprint/6493

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