discursive work for educational administrators: tensions in ńegotiating partnerships

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Discursive Work for EducationalAdministrators: Tensions in ńegotiatingpartnershipsTara J. Fenwick aa University of Alberta , CanadaPublished online: 15 Mar 2011.

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Discourse: studies in the cultural politics of education Vol. 25, No. 2, June 2004

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Discursive Work for Educational Administrators : Tensions in riego tia ting partnerships

Tara J. Fenwick* University of Alberta, Canada

This article draws on a case study of a school-university partnership negotiation to focus on the discursive practices at work. Two questions form the central focus of this article. Firstly, how do different discourses hnction in educational partnership negotiations? This highlights observations about which discourses are evident in individuals’ language and actions, how these may be related to individuals’ beliefs and social practices, and which tensions operate within and among particular discourses. The second question addresses implications of the case study: What does discursive analysis reveal about the work of educational administrators in conducting negotiations among different discursive communities? Employing methods of critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 1992), narratives of various participants in the partnership negotiations-parents, teachers, university faculty, school and school district personnel-were analyzed. The discussion explores overlapping discursive communities, troubling discursive intersections, tensions within discourses, and the generation of resistant discourses; it then examines the discursive work of administrators within these movements.When educational administrators must negotiate differences among their constituent groups, which they are called upon to do regularly, they are doing discursive work. This is part of the “new work order” (Gee, Hull & Lankshear, 1996), where the focus of learning is not children and schools, but knowledge distributed across lifelines, social practices and institutions: administrators must become adept at forming networks among multiple community interests and languages. As this article will argue, whenever educational administrators find themselves reconciling individuals’ different values, meanings or interests-arguably a fundamental dimension of much administrative activity-their success rests at least in part on their capacity to engage discursive work effectively. This work begins

*Department of Educational Policy Studies, Ed North 7-104, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB T6G 2G5, Canada. Email: [email protected]

ISSN 0159-6306 (print)/ISSN 1469-3739 (online)/04/020171-17 0 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd DOI: 10.1080/01596300410001692 139

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with critical awareness of discursive tensions at play, but also involves strategies of translating, spanning discourse communities and promoting discursive work. Particularly in situations where collaboration across differences is the objective, educational administrators are well served by an awareness of discursive dynamics and their own enmeshment and influence within those dynamics.

This argument is based on the specific instance of partnership negotiation. School partnerships are one area where collaboration is especially difficult; they also happen to be experiencing a growing political cachet and attractiveness to interest groups. Bainer’s (1997) comparison of four models of educational partnership indicates that while partnerships are highly situated, the most effective tend to be characterized by mutual goals, parity and commitment. The tensions within many partnerships frequently are traced to conflict among interests, cultures, values and beliefs held by different constituent groups (Noffke et al., 1996). Furthermore, while the notion of “partnership” implies a democratic linkage among egalitarian units, in practice the stakeholders in a partnership often bring different levels of need and resources. Different “partners” also may construct different expectations of the collaborative enter- prise, and may be constituted as differently influential within the negotiations.

These dimensions of partnership can usefully be examined as discursive practices. For example in educational partnerships Nakagawa (2000) suggests it is not uncommon for an institutional stakeholder to be constituted within a hierarchical structural discourse, where practices or rules and routines are formally standardized and codified into written text, and where roles and their scope of authority are clearly defined. Where the partner group functions within more informal, relational, intuitive or fluid discourses, it may have difficulty finding vocabulary or subjectivity within the managerial-structural discourse. Yet one stakeholder’s discourses do not square off in conflict with another’s. Both are enmeshed in the same discourses and, through interaction, with each other. The actions and stories of each at least partly construct the responses of the other. Their relative positions in their relationship shift through various movements of talk and mutual representations; the lines between them at best are blurry, even when they may perceive themselves to have been polarized. Third, within these interactions are myriad micro-disconnections and resistances among the logics of different discourses at work. This discursive circulation and complexity may help explain why, even when various parties are committed to principles of open dialogue (such as honesty, trans- parency, mutual trust, and time investment), communication in a partnership sometimes appears to lurch and break down.

So, discursive analyses of such interactions can open important insights into the linguistic workings of conflict and negotiations among differences occurring in educational partnerships. Furthermore, such analysis suggests approaches for educational administrators at different levels to perceive and work produc- tively with the movements of different discourses that are juxtaposed and interacting, in ways that may foster the common goals of the partners.

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Discursive Work for Educational Administrators 1 73

The analysis presented in this article focuses on a case study of a school-university parqership, which examines the negotiations of discursive practices that occurred. This case is complex because it involved four subgroups within a school-university partnership (university, small alternative lab school, public school and large public school district) and four unions. Others showed school-university cultural struggles in partnership implementation that were also evident in this case (Noffke et al., 1996; Richmond, 1996). But of greater interest is what happened amidst the negotiations, which sheds light on the complex discursive movements that occur when diverse communities attempt to define common principles for agreement.

Two questions explored in this case form the central argument of this article. The first is: How do diferent discourses function in educational partnership negotiations? This highlights observations about which discourses are evident in individuals’ language and actions, how these may be related to individuals’ beliefs and social practices, and what tensions operate within and among particular discourses. The second question addresses implications of the case study: What does discursive analysis reveal about the work of educational administrators in conducting negotiations among daferent discursive communities? The case analysis suggests that educational administrators need to be critically attuned to shifting discursive patterns that emerge in negotiations among different constituents: overlapping discursive communities, troubling discursive intersections, tensions within discourses, and resistant discourses. Administrators’ discursive work involves translating, rearticulating and spanning boundaries among discursive communities; furthermore, effective administrators appear also to signal explicitly the discursive work they are doing by promoting and modeling critical attunement to language. While the focus here is on negotiating partnerships, this discursive work can be seen to have broader application to any activity of educational administration involving relationship building and mediation of difference.

Focusing on Language and Discourse Analysis

According to Fairclough (1 992), whose methods of critical discourse studies appear useful for analyzing this case of partnership negotiations, everyday lives are increasingly textually mediated. In a changing workplace such as a school, new textual practices challenge established working knowledges, working identities and working relationships in what Farrell (2001) calls the ‘new word order’-discursive interventions usually wielded by change agents, educators or leaders. Critical discourse analysis explores how different discourses work. Janks (1 997) argues that close examination of texts and interactions in educational contexts is helpful in identifying prevailing discourses, how and by whom they are produced, taken up or resisted, interpreted and acted upon, and what results from discursive interactions.

From this discursive perspective, knowledge and social identities are not fixed but negotiated through different discursive positions and events. But

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these events are not neutral. Power dynamics inhse all discursive practices, and can both exclude and colonize, as well as amplify and expand. Activities and identities in the educational space are influenced by those discourses and their semiotics (the signs, codes and texts) which are most visible and accorded most authority by different groups sharing that space. These discourses legit- imate certain institutions and values and exclude others, by representing “norms” and casting nonconformists as “other” to these norms. This is where discursive practices become problematic. Foucault (1 980) taught u s to ask, What discursive mechanisms render an individual subject to regulation? And how do individuals internalize the very disciplines that construct and regulate their own identities, thus complying in subverting the possibility of their own resistance to subjection? Farrell (200 1) urges critical examination of how popular discourses that celebrate continuous learning, change, collaborative community and the like are naturalized and assimilated into organizational cultures, and where they subjugate existing discourses of craft knowledge, for example.

In analysing diverse discourses involved in creating a school partnership, then, one adopts what Patterson (1997) has called a “condition of doubt” to trace power relations evident in their interaction: which discourses are granted dominance, which are suppressed or nominalized, which become invisible and which struggle for voice or resist. These tensions can be expected to occur within as well as between discursive communities. For Fairclough and Wodak (1997), the process of discursive negotiation involves not just conflict but also semiotic hybridity, intertextuality and identity flow: “The radical disarticula- tions and rearticulations of contemporary social life radically unsettles and negotiates social identities.” Put differently, discursive dynamics among communities of difference may not be characterized simply as cycles of domination/ oppression, or as movements of conflict resistance. Instead, processes of exchange, absorption and mutual modification among each other’s texts and identities may also be at work (Farrell, 2000). Such processes are neither neutral nor readily evident. Their identification proceeds through detailed analysis of semiotic features of texts and interactions, then examines how they draw in innovative ways on the “orders of discourse”, the shifting discourses and genres in particular relations. But Fairclough’s project extends past identification of this discursive complexity, to highlight social problems from a critical stance. Two problems in particular interest Fairclough: needs-based problems (discursive practices going against people’s needs) and representa- tional problems (discursively constructing a minority group in ways that have negative social consequences). The point is to identify the nature and historical emergence of discursive practices creating the problem, examine their intercon- nection with the present system of social practices, and identify the real possibility within the local social domain where the problem is sustained to overcome it.

Finally, textuality itself is composed not just of what is said or written but also by what was left aside, unsaid, in choosing this signifier or that image to

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construct a particular meaning. Therefore, to deconstruct discourses is to examine not only the textual presences but also those absences implied by the present terms; that is, to read beyond and thus foreground the unsaid and unsayable within texts.

Negotiating a Multi-stakeholder School Partnership

This case centres on a university laboratory centre (ULC) that delivers fully accredited instruction to 350 children in classes from pre-kindergarten to grade 5. Operational since 1996 and directed by a university professor, this instruc- tional centre was situated within a large (35,000 students) Canadian university, and partially supported by the university for its service as a research site. Graduate students and faculty visited the classes to conduct research, exper- iment with pedagogical methods and offer demonstrations. The centre’s pedagogy was unique, using a project-based integrated method developed by the ULC director, and class sizes were relatively small (about 15 students to one teacher). In addition, each class had a second teacher classified as a “teaching partner”, who assisted the teacher and coordinated the research visitors and activities. Many ULC parents and teachers had been involved in the school for three or more years. By 2000, the school had outgrown its designated classroom spaces at the university. The director, after searching unsuccessfully for alternative environments, approached the local city school district (CSD) about the possibility of a partnership. This district is large and proud of its diversified program offerings; it already counted over thirty “alternative” programs distributed among its 208 schools, such as Christian “Logos” program- ming, French and other language immersion, and sports- or fine-arts-centered curricula. According to the CSD coordinator of alternative programs, the lab centre was considered a positive but not particularly unique addition to these alternative programs.

One district-operated elementary school near to the university, which shall be called “Seaview School” in this analysis, was selected for the possible new site of the ULC. Involved in the ensuing negotiations were the lab centre director, the school district coordinator of alternative programs and research, and the principal of Seaview School to which the ULC would potentially move. Parents and ULC teachers also soon became involved, as well as the new successors for both the ULC director and the Seaview principal. All parties pledged commitment to the partnership itself, as well as to mutual understand- ing and to dialogue as a process for attaining it. Eventually a partnership agreement was created and implemented, but not without stormy meetings, polarized positions, misunderstandings and the departure of the public school principal on stress-related disability leave.

The case was researched through document analysis and 14 personal in- depth interviews conducted with a range of participants in the negotiations. Documents included policy statements and other texts related to partnerships and alternative schools prepared by the school district, documents prepared by

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the ULC stating its program philosophy and other operational features, and the partnership agreement itself. However the inquiry focused mainly on the interview tapes and transcripts. Those interviewed included the original and incoming ULC directors, all parents sitting on the ULC executive (who were the most closely involved with the partnership negotiations), all ULC teachers and teaching partners, university faculty members who frequently used the lab centre, the school district coordinator of special programs and the Seaview principals (outgoing and incoming).

Participants were each asked first to narrate the chronology of events representing the beginnings and motivation of their involvement in the case, and the interactions that occurred during that time period. Then, they were asked to identify and reflect on the significance of particular incidents they identified as critical to their organization and to themselves personally. Dis- course analysis proceeded on the interview transcripts following approaches suggested by Fairclough (1 992). Semantical and critically interpretive analysis of individuals’ narratives indicated particular discursive practices (identified by force, coherence and intertextuality) that, when compared with others, yielded some common themes shared within groups, as well as clear tensions within and between the groups’ discursive patterns. The analysis was inductive; the discourses at work were identified bottom-up through participants’ own narrative structures and choice of signifiers, rather than through a comparison of individuals’ practices and narratives with pre-identified dominant societal discourses. An important limitation in this study in terms of discursive analysis is that the only interactions recorded and analyzed were those of individual participants with the researchers. While this prevented analysis of interactional patterns among participants within the contexts of their everyday activity, it enabled the examination of individuals’ language and perspectives without direct suppression or modification through others’ influence.

Overlapping Discursive Communities

Not surprisingly, the city school district administrators and the university lab centre administrators each employed a distinctive language. As can be seen in the following discussion, many of these educational administrators did not indicate awareness of these discursive dynamics, interpreting them as positional differences or discounting them as simple definitional variations. The CSD narratives were characterized by what could be called a managerial-structural discourse. Partners were described as “stakeholders’’, the ULC was portrayed as only one of “thirty alternate programs” that were viewed as large blocks to be incorporated within the school system, and the goal was to achieve an “administrative arrangement” that must be “hammered out” in “nitty-gritty details”. The original Seaview principal, preparing to receive the ULC school into his building, stated the core questions in structural terms: “What are the benefits to each of our organizations that we can achieve together? What are the administrative responsibilities on each side?” The partnership negotiation task

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Discursive Work for Educational Administrators 177

was portrayed in managerial terms-“processes of gathering information, me- diating highly intense emotions and commitments”. Frequent references among district and school-based administrators to rational processes of clarify- ing “core values” indicated a belief that common core values can and should be articulated explicitly so that all can see where they agree. This managerial- structural discourse was pervaded by the governing assumption of a unitary philosophy of schooling and pedagogy. This was linked to recognition of a clear centre of authority that legitimately exerts control over programs and hiring, assessment of pedagogical value, and boundaries limiting operations:

We have developed a philosophy and we have processes and we have expectations of principals and school staff and we have defmed a role for parent groups. We evolved to a stage where we could put that down in writing and share it with our schools so that they know what the base is in our district. (CSD coordinator of alternative programs)

The “we” pronoun represents an unproblematic alignment of everybody with the “processes and expectations” and “base” that have been determined by the district’s management, and linguistically excludes the possibility of contesta- tion. Relying on rational articulation of positions and formal codification of principles and practices in written text, this discourse was predicated on concerns for clear structures and accountability: “We are clear about what we’ve approved and that we have something to fall back on should there be some disputes or need for resolution.”

By contrast, the language shared among the directors, teachers and parents of the university lab centre was informal, feelings based and could be characterized as “fluid-communal”. The ULC assistant director explained,

There was never a formal framework under which the centre operated, which made it easy to understand your role-it was always evolving and changing. Often we were self-defined, sometimes it was defined for us and as it grew, of course it changed.

Teachers and parents described ULC as small, caring and “connected”-“like a family”. Parents knew the teachers, trusted them and were concerned about their well-being; they often dropped into classrooms or waited around in the school in the mornings, settling in their children and talking to teachers about their child’s needs and attitudes. Decision making was described as loose and “informal”, typically consultative in the early stages. Teachers relied on daily informal conversations to address issues; staff meetings were often impromptu, sitting around a table. This discourse was largely oral: nothing until recently had existed in writing to describe the school’s philosophy and structure, or to specify procedures, standards or evaluation. Roles of teacher, parent, parent executive and administrator were fluid, as a teacher explained: “We kind of slipped in and out of everyone’s shoes at different times.” One parent’s description illuminates the key distinctions and potential points of conflict between this fluid-communal discourse and the managerial-structural discourse used by the city school district administrators:

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We have this culture of respect . . . you can’t separate that into an organizational thing, so you have a real communal sort of way or learning. The teachers talk to these children. They are so respectful that their education is not a pre-conceived box that’s given to them.

This culture may not be untypical of many alternative schools where parents and teachers are highly committed to and even fiercely protective of what they perceive to be a unique program, and whose interactions tend to be “family- like” and personal. But what further distinguishes the ULC is its enmeshment with university culture. The focus on inquiry projects in pedagogy and visitors’ interests, the children’s daily access to a wide range of university resources, and the general autonomy and freedom from bureaucratic control pervading the school’s teaching practices are more aligned with the discursive practices of the university than that of public school systems. Furthermore, the frequent involvement of university faculty, students and visiting scholars as observers and demonstrators lent an air of importance to the centre’s everyday activities. This was clearly a place of ongoing research, not just another school.

Across these two discursive communities, key terms would be employed interchangeably carrying vastly different meaning and political associations within each group. “Integrity” and “core values”, for example, were treated as powerful signifiers by both groups. Yet for the CSD administrators, integrity meant, in the words of the first Seaview principal, “a real commitment to the whole . . . if we can strive for the bigger ideal of what we’re aiming for then we can manage some of the issues around personalities”. For the ULC, integrity was about preserving a small, special fluid-communal community and its freedom-in-inquiry teaching and learning approaches. The ULC “teaching partner”, an important signifier of the program’s uniqueness, was translated into CSD language as a “teacher’s aide”, a much lower-paid, less-educated and lower-status position. “Research” for ULC was longer-term, basic scholarship; for the CSD, research was short term, applied, and related directly to district goals such as improving achievement scores. While the ULC sniffed at this meaning of research, the CSD was discomfited by what it perceived as inequitable principles undergirding a teaching partner allocated to classrooms where parents were sufficiently affluent to pay supporting fees.

Troubling Discursive Intersections

When educational administrators negotiate among such differences, tensions among constituents may be misinterpreted as simple value conflicts when in fact there are multiple discursive intersections at play. These are accessible when administrators listen closely to how language is used by different community participants. In this case, like the dominant CSD discourse, the dominant ULC discourse was imbued with a sense of homogeneity and coherence in shared interests and understandings about the collaborative purposes and operational processes of the school. Some parents described city district schools in derogatory extremes: “hierarchical box-cars”, “prison-like”,

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places of “spoon-fed curriculum”, “lacking creativity and spontaneity”. This language polarized a “we” united in a special pedagogical philosophy to which “they” are insensitive. The fixed and unforgiving narrative of the public school produced through these terms appeared to be shared among the ULC parents, which, through fear-mongering, in fact may have helped bind the group.

In contrast to the emotional intensity characterizing the ULC participants’ descriptions of their program and the perceived threat posed by the CSD, the managerial-structural discourse hardly recognizes this emotionality and commitment. The original Seaview principal focused on “clear communication”, holding a workshop with parents to articulate their hopes and fears (not his own): “I think ... they felt that they were being listened to and that we were trying to address their needs”-albeit within a controlling managerial-structural discourse, with its unitary assumptions and faith in rational mediation of interests.

While the principal’s approach was described as well intentioned if na’ive and a bit clumsy by the ULC director, the parents became infuriated, much to the principal’s bewilderment. Their prevailing sense was that ULC had been misunderstood, its implicit culture of collaboration and intimate relationships unacknowledged and, worse, the CSD had judged the ULC negatively as a non-accountable, non-substantive program. Parents declared, “I really had no faith that [the principal] really had a concept of the learning environment nor the program.” At issue was the special positive nature of their program, which ULC teachers and parents believed to be self-evident.

The city district narrative, however, cast the ULC as just another one of thirty alternative programs in its jurisdiction, and not particularly unique. The district’s approach to the partnership was to outline formal terms for governing alternative schools, which was perceived by some ULC participants as a threat, an attempt to swallow and homogenize their distinctive program. The CSD coordinator represented its own discourse as broad minded, systemic and universal.

You’re not in competition, you are working together for the good of all kids in that school. It’s what you do as a collective. And so trying to change that mind shift from “it’s you and 25 kids” to “it’s you as a community trying to improve”-your school community, your parent community, your broader community, and how do we work better together in support and across schools.

The CSD coordinator’s language here disciplines everybody-especially teachers-as requiring change, policing their shift from local to organization-level discursive practices. The “good of all kids” is left undefined, presumably because common understandings prevail and do not require explanation. The explicit emphasis on collective “working together” for kids is almost identical to the stated ULC values of collaborative teamwork. However framed within disparate discursive communities, one which relies on formal structures, authority and systemic arrangements and the other on fluid arrangements, informal processes, personal language and relationships, the intersections among ULC

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and CSD participants were often perceived as conflictual rather than as shared values.

Tensions within Discourses

To the listening administrator, the illusion that a discursive community is homogeneous-incidentally, an illusion perpetuated in both the ULC and the CSD administrative communities-can mask the internal tensions emerging in the spaces between sweeping discursive claims of collaboration. Whether or not these tensions are brought into the community’s language and recognized can be a function of fear, a collective desire to preserve or strengthen dominant narratives, or individual uncertainty about the legitimacy of counter-cultural practices and perspectives. In this case, two examples of discursive tensions help illustrate these dynamics. The first relates to certain concerns about the informal, apparently non-regulated practices of the lab centre expressed by one of the senior teachers. Because the pedagogy stressed freedom-of teachers designing curriculum, of children pursuing inquiry projects and of parents flowing in and out of the school’s permeable boundaries-teachers here enjoyed more autonomy than they would in most public schools. This was what attracted and retained most teachers in the lab centre, even those who were fully accredited teachers but hired as lesser-paid teaching partners. The ULC director too, under the informal decision-making practices, simply went off herself in search of alternative accommodation when the university space shortage became apparent. However, for one of the senior teachers, teaching practices had become problematic. Without accountability and at least a modicum of regulation, she argued, some questionable decisions were being made: “teachers were getting away with anything”. Meanwhile the ULC administrative processes floated with a university professor/director who was able to run her own show. The very autonomy and fluidity of the community was splintering it:

[The ULC] started to lose all of its integrity. I lost interest in it. I started to mentally withdraw. Before that happened, we got together as a problem rose-we talked about it together as a staff and usually we would manage to work it out. We have enough trust and respect with each other. And then it started to fall apart.

After some direct challenges of these practices with teachers and director in the ULC community, this individual chose to remove herself altogether by resign- ing, rather than to pursue conflictual confrontation that was further fragment- ing the dominant fluid-communal discourse.

In the city school district, an interesting if understated tension arose when the new Seaview principal entered the whole partnership negotiation process. Self-described as “emotional” in contrast to the former principal’s “methodical” approach, she appeared in many ways more at home in the ULC language than in the managerial-structural discourse. She claimed to have been

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excited by the opportunity to learn about project-based pedagogy, which was aligned with her own teaching philosophies. As a first approach she wanted to listen and observe negotiation meetings to understand the ULC parents and teachers. However, as she explained, she also was new to administration, nervous about her performance in her first principal’s position and intimidated by the conflicts among the partners in the ULC negotiations. So she assumed that her natural instincts toward more personal one-to-one relationships were wrong, and strove to emulate the former principal’s structural approaches. Parents complained that she was unavailable and uncommunicative. In retro- spect, this principal acknowledged performing the managerial-structural discourse, and the subsequent problems:

Sometimes I really had panic feelings ... I’m not a power person but I think I acted like a power person in my attempt to try and figure out this complex job I have. I wanted to take control of everything so I didn’t screw up-I’m going to be held responsible for this, you can have input but I make the decisions. And I didn’t understand that I was not listening as much as I might have.

In both instances, the discursive tension was contained at the personal level. The individuals who became aware of the anomie opening between the dominant discourse and their own desires had to decide a course of action. One, with long experience in the organization and security in her own voice, chose to resist and attempt to show others the shortcomings in the accepted practices. When the results became conflictual, destroying the core discursive threads she was fighting to preserve, she resigned from the community altogether in an act of self-regulation. The other, uncertain of her authority and anxious for approval by a discursive community to which she felt obligated, found herself taking up dominant practices and suppressing her own language. Both situations illustrate how discipline is exercised through discourses. The appearance of shared understandings conceals multiple conflicting interactions as community participants take up or resist, fully or partially, aspects of its dominant discursive practices.

Resistant Discourses

When negotiating among these interactions educational administrators are well served by attention to resistant discourses. Analysis of where and how resistant discourses emerge, according to Fairclough (1992), offers a useful view of the complexities amidst shifting power relations. Unlike internal discursive tensions that function more like disturbances than devastations within a discursive community, resistance is exercised through an identifiable counter-discourse. In this case, the parents gradually shifted from benign and marginal involvement in the negotiations to a collective politicized force. This insurgent-activist discourse was confrontational and oppositional, characterized by its participants as “taking a stand” and “taking the issues into our own hands” and by non-participants as ‘‘up in arms” and “storming”. Parents expressed surprise at

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the identity shifts they felt themselves experiencing as they took up this discourse, and some pride at the CSD response of surprise.

By contrast the CSD language reflects a liberal, apolitical sense of diversity. Variety is viewed as inherently good, without acknowledgment of the asymmetrical power relations among various groups, and between the groups and the umbrella authority.

The district philosophy is that you have diversity within community ... our preferred model is to have alternatives within schools. You have multiple programs in one school and it reflects our broader society that people have different philosophical approaches yet they get along as neighbours.

To the parents taking up an insurgent-activist discourse, this assimilationist discourse sparked further antagonism, as one mother explained: “The principal would say things like ‘I want you integrated into this school system as quickly as possible’ which every parent was hyperventilating emergency [sic] over that.”

Various intersecting events prompted the growth of this insurgent discourse. Parents who had been informally chatting in the mornings when dropping off children began to realize decisions were being made about the ULC fate that affected them: “We saw that the different stakeholders were taking care of their interests. There didn’t seem to be anybody acting for best interests of the children.” A budget shortfall threatened the loss of a teaching partner, and prompted a sense of crisis that the ULC program’s integrity and even survival was at stake. Some parents also realized their own power in selecting where the tax dollars following their child would fall.’ So, a meeting was organized. Additional meetings soon proved how intensive and emotionally draining was this discursive work. Some parents felt they were doing all the work and others reaped the benefits. Other parents opted out of struggle and left the ULC, leaving holes in the ULC enrolment and budget. Within the resistance discourse itself, different positions emerged, between those resisting any move from the university at all, and those supporting a partnership that met their needs.

The Seaview principal found the group so divided that he declared negotiation with them all to be impossible. At this point, one father emerged as leader of the parents, helping them to unify their position and communicate it effectively to the CSD. This man’s language, ironically, reflects the managerial- structural discourse that would be recognizable to the district administrators. He spoke of clear interest camps reaching agreement, then roll-out: “We positioned ourselves as three stakeholders to pilot a new structure. It’s like a trial, manufacturing a new product.” The parents independently of the university decided to research alternative structures for the ULC program (such as private school and charter school options), then produced a written statement of the program’s philosophy and operations.

Here is the discursive hybridity and intertextuality that Fairclough and Wodak (1997) describe in working across differences. By taking up selected language and practices of a rational discourse and removing itself somewhat

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from the personal, the emotive and the communal, by treating the ULC as requiring neither more nor less special consideration than any alternative program demands and by treating the negotiations as an apolitical technical process, the insurgent-activist discourse paradoxically gained parity with the CSD. The parents ultimately won the right to retain the autonomy of the ULC project-based pedagogy, the continuance of special teaching partners in the classrooms, and the fluid access to classrooms they had enjoyed at the university. These concessions required the CSD to broaden its policies, and even adopt the term “teaching partner”, which directly challenged its own personnel classification.

Administrators Doing Discursive Work

The foregoing discussion explores, within the context of the ULC-Seaview- CSD partnership negotiations, the question, How do different discourses function in educational partnership negotiations? Of course, as was illustrated, there were tensions within each group-although these were contained and disciplined within the dominant discourses, illustrating the power of a shared language and discursive practices that develop within a community. But, as the community representatives tried to reach agreement, discursive issues frequently became foremost. Sometimes these issues centered on different meanings and values for identical terms; sometimes in discursive practices confronting, opposing and, in a few instances, assimilating one another. But largely these dynamics moved unrecognized at a tacit level. Where there was conflict, participants tended to see only differences in position or interests. The discursive struggles rarely surfaced, and only a few individuals expressed awareness of them. But what are the implications of all this for educational administrators? What does discursive analysis reveal about the work of educational administrators in conducting negotiations among dzfferent discursive communities?

The analysis to this point illustrates the importance of being alert to shifting discursive patterns and power asymmetries among discourses. Neither the district coordinator nor the original Seaview principal appeared aware of the effects of the powerful formal managerial-structural discourse on a small group held together by an informal, relational set of discursive practices, despite the principal’s self-perception as being the “one most committed to open communication”. He experienced such distress during the negotiation struggles that he developed a serious illness forcing him to take medical leave.

The ULC, too, was “pretty na’ive’’ in its negotiations in the words of one teacher, believing its language and practices were transparent and its self-per- ceptions shared by other partners. The parents’ strategy of responding to the CSD using its own discursive practices was key to moving towards resolution: articulating in formal terms the program’s rationale and philosophy, consoli- dating their cause and demands and adopting a structural approach to the negotiations. The drawback was the consequent eraion of the community’s identity as it was constituted through informal relational talk, which was

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184 T. J. Fenwick

increasingly replaced by memos and regulation. This hybridization may be viewed as a necessary shift towards the emergence of a new entity that no party could foresee: the ULC/Seaview school, which might eventually demonstrate more or less distinct characteristics of the former school and university lab centre, alongside the blurred areas between them generated through continued everyday negotiations and compromises.

A complex web of leaders intersected through the partnership negotiations. Besides the outgoing and incoming Seaview principals and their city district’s administrative structures, the ULC had its own director, a one-quarter-time elementary education professor whose expertise was self-admittedly not administration, and the university department chair and dean to whom she was accountable. With her imminent retirement, the ULC appointed a new acting director, a former professor and senior administrator in the provincial education ministry. This person’s leadership was considered important by most parents, teachers and CSD administrators in finally achieving a formal partnership contract that was agreeable to all participant groups. The new acting director was reported to have excelled in language strategies of articulation and translation. Parents claimed she understood their perspective then mirrored it back to them in language capturing the nuances of their meanings and feelings. Teachers claimed that she explained various partners’ meanings to one another, adeptly translating concepts into different community’s terms. She was also perceived by parents, teachers and Seaview principals to understand and steer them safely through the political systems at work behind the negotiations, in the larger discursive communities of the university and the school district.

So besides awareness, the leadership approach of “doing” discursive work appears fundamental in working through differences among groups. Discursive work is more than “opening lines of communication”, a common recommen- dation in administrative literature, as indicated by the unfortunate experience of the first Seaview principal. In this case, the strategies of the new ULC director appeared more effective in achieving a difficult partnership agreement: pointing to discursive constructions of difference, translating, rearticulating and spanning discursive boundaries. Others also played important roles in discursive work. The father who worked with the parents to hybridize their discourse and translate their terms was instrumental in gaining a respective ear. Recall also the discursive translations undertaken by the ULC teacher who first moved to the Seaview school with a pilot class: she invited other teachers to observe her classroom, displayed ULC children’s work in school hallways and generally attempted to interpret to Seaview community members the ULC process, borrowing Seaview’s language.

For leaders, frequent productive learning opportunities for themselves and the entire community are exposed in ongoing discursive negotiations. The new Seaview principal described her own process of becoming more alert to these opportunities. In her shift to view the ULC partnership as a unique situation rather than just another alternative program for her to administer, with strong identities and discourses at stake, she was torn between her immersion in the

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prevailing philosophies of the school district and her growing alliance with the discursive practices of the lab centre operating within the school. Through self-reflexive examination of her own positionality in the dynamics, she appeared to recognize the difficult power relations embedded in the intersecting discourses. She also discerned the sources of her own resistance. For herself, struggles to work through the meanings of equity held by the different communities became the most challenging:

I understand the parent pledges [fees paid by ULC parents for special program- ming] and the reasons but it just flies in the face of everything I believe, and I know that it’s met approval of our school district and I know we’re not doing anything illegal or immoral, but I don’t like it.

This principal also conceptualized the negotiated partnership as just the begin- ning of a long-term project in the communication labor of listening, translating and signalling discursive work as learning opportunities: “This is ongoing work.”

Perhaps this is what “doing” discursive work implies for administrators. Where different communities must come together as in a partnership, each aligned with distinctive discourses, the communicative work is hard work, and it is never-ending. This case indicates that clear lines of conflict are difficult to discern and conflict “management” technologies somewhat too blunt to deploy amid such complexity. Discursive communities even when apparently distinct actually overlap, mirroring and co-producing one another, and even joining at certain points to produce hybrids. While between them are varying troubled nodes or intersections, these are dynamic, not fixed, roving according to circulations of power and shifting identities. At times these appear to create clear bihrcations between communities, but when we look closer we see masses of small connections and local alliances between the communities as well. And internal to each community, tensions within their discursive movements are always circulating despite our wishes to contain them as a recognizable identity, as when the Seaview principal became utterly exasperated at the lack of unity among ULC parents. Sometimes these tensions within gather sufficient intensity to be discernible as a “riftyy or resistant discourse, which may then be contained within the boundaries of one community or spin out to form a new, more distinct discursive system.

In such partnership negotiations characterized by asymmetrical power relations and different sociocultural and discursive traditions, communication is obviously key. However, administrators are called upon to do far more than listen and try to appreciate diversity. As discursive workers, their role combines promotion and modeling of critical attunement to language, with design. Gee (2000) suggests that design-of identities, affinity groups and networks, of communication links across organizations and networks involving the unfam- iliar, large and diffuse-is becoming a core discursive ability.

This critical and designing discursive work requires myriad language capac- ities: engaging participants in critical textual readings, calling attention to

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discursive patterns, noting discursive shifts and constructions, translating, clarifymg, and spanning discursive dynamics. The work is conducted as much in local, everyday informal conversations as it is in formal meetings and crafting of partnerships. Amidst it all, administrators as discursive workers need to be continually self-reflexive to their own implication in the unfolding languages, the connections and disconnections, at both micro and macro levels. Such work is hard, ubiquitous and ongoing. Eschewing it for more concrete and promising solutions may be tempting; recognizing it may open new strategies for working across and through differences.

Ackowledgements

Anonymous reviewers of an earlier draft of this article offered suggestions that have strengthened the argument and are gratefully acknowledged. Any further errors and weaknesses are, of course, my own.

Note

1. In the Canadian province where this study was conducted, a fixed dollar amount per child is allotted to schools across the province. An individual school’s funding is determined by the total student enrolment on 30 September. Parents can and do choose schools without boundary constraint, and schools therefore compete to attract students.

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