“Lazarus” school rising: Finding renewed hope with a “little help from our friends”

You may be forgiven for not fully comprehending the professional uncertainty and emotional turmoil experienced by school leaders and teachers when situated on the precipice of school closure because of falling enrolments. You would have to experience it to truly know it. But imagine if you have been a member of that school’s leadership or teaching team for ten years or more where threat of closure has been a perpetually sobering occurrence. What would that feel like? How would that affect the way you teach and lead? How would it affect the way others learn? This case study tells of such a story. It is a story that needs to be told with theoretical acumen and descriptive finesse to show how any school faced with similar dire circumstances can learn from the “Lazarus School Rising” case study. The story increases awareness of the power of partnerships, the competitiveness of the educational marketplace and the need to unlearn and learn afresh schooling practices towards a market “savvy” form of schooling ideology, purpose and practice.

In this case study, the school leadership and governing council welcomed a university and a neighbouring school strategic partnership proposal to become a STEAM school. The proposal came just before the “midnight hour” of voting for closure approached. A new STEAM school vision and mission was welcomed, engendering support from high political places. For Lazarus Secondary School, the hope of finding a competitive edge in a “survival of the fittest” schooling marketplace (Connell, 2015) became a living reality. Their decision tells a story of how and why leaders and teaching staff were prepared to embrace their new STEAM approach. This case study describes how a more hopeful future was achieved through university-led activism with key school and community actors, agitating for a curriculum that fostered school sustainability, turnaround and reinvigoration.

Holding on to institutionalised ways of “doing” schooling year after year meant that this school (which we rename as “Lazarus”, a well-known New Testament biblical story of a well-loved and respected man rising from the grave) was unable to find a competitive edge to attract new student enrolments. During the 1970s and 1980s the school catered for 800 students but over a ten-year period it had become residualised by school market competition, catering for only 120 enrolments in 2016 of which 40 were students in the Disability Unit. Year after year Lazarus was positioned on the brink of closure, only kept alive by a slim majority of school parents voting to keep the school going. According to the principal, in November 2016, facing another closure vote, amidst “negative local media” press and “toxic social media” and a multi-million-dollar education department plan to relocate the students to a nearby school, the school’s end looked imminent.

In a “reimagining” process, described as “an exploration of community tactics driven by a social justice mandate” through action research, a proposal was provided to the principal to repurpose the school with a focus on STEAM.

A single bounded case study involved an initial phase of action research (Kemmis, 2006; Kemmis & Taggart, 1988, 2005; Carr & Kemmis, 1983) to support a residualised school from impending closure. This was then followed by eight semi-structured teacher and leader interviews hermeneutically analysed, constituting a two-phase project with a theoretical lens of social science theory using Meighan’s sociological component theory. The component theory approach was first developed by Meighan (1981) and has since been used to articulate ideologies within multi-cultural contexts (May, 1992), Christian education (Giles, 1995) curriculum development (Brown 1988) and the de-schooling movement (Meighan & Siraj-Blatchford, 2003). The theoretical perspective of Meighan’s sociological component theory underscores the use of the two methodologies briefly described below. The component theories approach provides a direct link between one’s philosophy, with its implicit assumptions, and the explicit principles and practices that are associated with that philosophy (Giles 1995; Knight 1989). Ideologies considered as shared understandings when framed using component theories can assist in the fleshing out of a new expression of education elicited across interviews. Our major question was; “What is the ideological nature of STEAM schooling as seen from the principal and teachers’ perspective?” A second was “How are the leaders and teachers engaging with their new ideological approach to schooling?”

The mixed methods nature of this study involves a two part research project using a theoretical lens of social science theory overlaying the sequential research approach. These overlaying research approaches comprised Part 1—the action research enterprise to invoke a new and sustainable STEAM school identity and purpose, followed by Part 2—interviews with the teacher and leader participants about how they understood and experienced the unfolding STEAM agenda brought into being by the action research. Part 2 allowed us to give voice to diverse perspectives to better advocate for marginalised participants and better understand a phenomenon and process that is changing as a result of being researched. According to Cresswell and Cresswell (2017), little scholarly work has been done on this method with little guidance on how to use the transformative vision to guide the methods. Of note, the findings in the first action research phase became the focus in the second semi-structured interviews phase.

In Part 1, action research was used in the beginning months of the study, prior to the community school closure vote. This type of research was described by Carr and Kemmis (1983) as “making the probing character of strategic action problematic” and “reconstructing past action on the basis of observation and future action in the light of reflection” with the problem “resolved by a living dialectic of action and reflection” (p. 160).

In Part 2 of the study, semi structured leader and teacher interviews were undertaken using hermeneutic methodology as outlined below by Paterson and Higgs.

Gadamer (1975, 1981) described this process as an ongoing hermeneutic circle of interpretation, manifesting in a continual movement of seeking understanding by the researchers derived from the whole (entire data sets), to the part (individual interview data sets and their component meanings), and then back to the whole. This meant in practice that we involved ourselves in a “to-ing” and “fro-ing” of the interview data, seeking themed meanings from the individual interview data sets and their components of meaning, and then returning to the whole data sets to configure whole of study meanings.

Semi-structured interviews provide the opportunity to gather data from participants through both open and closed questions. The intention was to gain in-depth understandings of how the new STEAM educational ideology of the school was being understood and wrestled with by staff. Semi-structured interviews allow for dialogue around observations made by the participants and the researchers, the exploration of patterns within the participants’ responses, as well as the opportunity to “member check” the transcripts. Each participant was individually interviewed, for a period of 45–60 minutes using a digital recorder.

Part 3 provides an analysis and discussion of the data emanating from the action research and the leader and teacher interviews. These activities took place after the school voted to stay open, and worked to becoming a new STEAM school.

The interviews were recorded as conversations. Prompts elicited the interview subjects’ stories of reform, with occasional interviewer guidance toward key subject areas. The conversations were initially analysed through narrative analysis. This analysis focused on how the teachers identified as teachers across their careers, and within the context of school reform. How these teachers were disposed to particular pedagogical and curriculum approaches was also a key consideration. The open interview process was channelled toward the teachers’ dispositions to STEAM and organisational change. The interview subjects’ stories were distilled and developed into a precis outlining the key lines of dialogue, and the key themes. One of these key themes concerning how the new STEAM ideological schooling agenda was made sense of and engaged with by the teachers and leaders is reported on in depth in Part 2 of this paper.

The thematic analysis followed a thematised life history approach. This approach places the subject within their broader life history, their employment history leading to the interview subjects’ current circumstances. The analysis is sociological and phenomenological in that it is concerned with the construction of the interview subjects’ interests and concerns as well as the question of agency within the described structural relations of the school and education system. Palmer (1998) has described this as a fleshing out process of “authoring” or “scripting” our way, and dynamically managing the presenting paradoxes.

School leadership and teaching can be wearing day in, day out, if a school is losing enrolments and, as a consequence, facing impending closure. Many schools have been closed after years facing negative social and mainstream media exposure that impact enrolments. Schools close after losing out to new school competition in the region. With metropolitan schools situated on valuable land that can be sold for real estate development, a school closure deal can mean a cash bonanza for the state. Lazarus school, which is situated on major arterial roads, with excellent public transport access and growing real estate developments nearby, could find itself in such a perilous situation. Lazarus school has a community drama centre, a well-regarded special education unit and basketball programme, and extensive grounds and convenient geographical positioning near a large university. It also had a school activist parent group fighting to keep the school going.

Through the research team’s regional educational networks we learnt that historical primary feeder schools were in some cases not advertising to parents the possibility of enrolling their children at “Lazarus”. The school was considered to be close to “closure” or mistakenly, closure was considered fait accompli. Many of the nearby principals from the feeder primary schools believed that school closure was certain and gave this message to prospective secondary school parents, further dismantling any chance of enrolment growth at Lazarus. The school’s image in the community represented a “loss of faith” in the quality of teaching and learning processes and, because of the school’s very small size, it had become known for having to rationalise its senior secondary curriculum options. However, community support for its Special Education Unit was very positive. We posited that a new “brand” of schooling emanating from a repurposing of the school’s educational mission and vision could offer renewed hope for the school to become sustainable. Especially if that “brand” met a regional market need not catered for, and also met the needs of the current students. A school delivering on a STEAM agenda seemed an appropriate fit for this market gap.

Facing down the abyss of school closure can mean many things to teachers and leaders. For some, it can mean saying goodbye to a place of work, farewelling cherished colleagues, feelings of teaching and leadership failure, or entering into a chasm of uncertainty about job futures plagued with professional doubt. For others, it may signal the need for change and be welcomed as such. But in this case study, these feelings are repositioned into a school that will not close, buoyed by a 10-million-dollar investment from the Department of Education to continue and grow as a STEAM entity. It also means that what was once known as familiar teaching and learning practices are no more. The “world” has changed overnight and this change introduces different lived experiences from stakeholders exposed to the change. We now turn to these interview renditions as they presented as key themes from the Lazarus teachers and leaders.

Dominant neoliberal public policy in Australia continues to coerce principals into maintaining historical schooling design logics and constrained individual schooling purposes for individual social mobility and economic realities, distracting focus from the larger purposes of education and changing work futures (Reid, 2012, 2018). These pressures work to subvert the work of principals and teachers from enabling robust and engaging student learning practices to flourish and chain secondary schooling design to historical and, in some instances, redundant conventional forms (Tyack & Cuban, 1995; Tyack & Tobin 1994), leaving students with fragmentary and disconnected understandings (Bills, Giles, & Rogers, 2017).

With all public secondary schools in Australia situated within a dominant public policy regime that demands compliance, standardisation and having to do more with less (AITSL, 2017; Bills, 2018; Comber & Nixon, 2009; Goff & Sanborn, 2013), the dominant educational rhetoric towards innovation seems seriously compromised and problematic. Principals are grappling with public policy ideology and demands that are filled with mixed messages and de-contextualised prescriptions (Bills, 2018; Bills et al., 2017; Starr 2014) about what constitutes “good” schooling. In the face of dominant economic rationalist ideology, we would argue that the most important resource that leaders have is their ability to understand, analyse, and imagine (Thomson, Gunter & Blackmore, 2014) in order to relationally lead public schools attuned to their local context. These abilities point to the priority of understanding the unique purposes of public education, being attuned to what the education marketplace is calling for, relational sensibilities that promote these purposes and courageous educational leadership that is always sensitive to local context (Bills et al., 2017).

With dominant policy rhetoric emanating from the South Australian Department for Education being, “Children and young people at the centre of everything we do” (DECD 2010, 2014), public school principals are ironically required to practise an authentic and courageous expression of this mantra that questions the system to which this rhetoric belongs and speaks back with a model of practice that is genuinely concerned for socially just, relational and humanistic educational praxis (Bills, 2018; Bills et al. 2017; Bills et al. 2016). For Lazarus school, ongoing compliance to the standards rhetoric of what the “good” school is, and how it should behave, had placed it in an unwinnable market position. It was losing enrolments and facing closure in an educational marketplace resplendent with well-publicised comprehensive academic schools that “sucked” prospective student enrolments away from Lazarus. Luck and good fortune played a part in this successful change agenda.

Lazarus had sufficient political leverage forged through a partnership agreement with two influential entities, the nearby university and AHS, to be seen by the educational bureaucracy as a school worthy of significant funding support for its new STEAM agenda.

Reframing the school’s ideological framework was reflective of how action research, with its ongoing spirals of action and reflection, represents a powerful methodology for enacting institutional and political change when the process is imbued with critical discernment and networked political involvement informing the action steps. The action research recognised the highly influential stakeholder power-groups, and sought these groups through negotiation for a more hopeful future for Lazarus. If the method in this instance had lacked this action reflection interplay, the possibilities of engendering new life at Lazarus would have been missed.

University education faculties can offer critical insights for schools into ways to address falling enrolments and foster organisational change to become market-place competitive. An examination of the social and political networks in play, and the power relationships that can be exploited within these social networks, can help schools see a way through the abyss of impending closure. In other words, by activating political allies through action research, school turnaround can be made possible.

This research also illustrated each participant’s ongoing attempt to establish linkages between their repositioned professional identities and educational philosophies that underpinned their ideology in praxis. This rearticulation of their teacher identities occurred in their context as a repurposed STEAM school. Attending sensitively to school organisational storylines as an ideological representation of experiences, perceptions and meanings from the past that influence the present was crucial to the success of the action research STEAM intervention. These different ideologies exist as shared understandings in the form of an organisational philosophy (Schein, 2010). Meighan and Siraj-Blatchford (1997) indicate that ideology is defined as a broad interlocked set of ideas and beliefs about the world held by a group of people that they demonstrate to various audiences in both behaviour and conversation. These systems of belief are usually seen as the way things really are by the groups holding them, and they become the taken-for-granted way of making sense of the world. Ideologies by their nature engage in competitive processes of legitimation and incorporation, where dominant and minority ideologies play out their political agendas in public and private spaces. These competitive processes are systemic to being human and can be seen and told in every organisation. In this case study, the nature and movement of the ideological positioning shows the interplay between the dominant, taken for granted storyline in tension with the revisionist STEAM storyline that came into play.

Those in positional power must at times display the courage to let go of dominant ideologies of schooling to allow a new storyline trajectory to take shape. In this case study, the Lazarus historical storyline was not ignored in the school’s new ideological framing. In fact, what was valued in the past was held onto in the new framing, an appreciative approach that helped the teachers and the parents see that their new journey built upon what the parent and teacher community valued in the past. In this instance, the teachers were given more hope through the radical “market savvy” school re-visioning. This called the leader into strategic considerations of how to move the school forward along this new trajectory. “While leaders in any organisation hold positional power, they need to strategically consider how they engage with the system’s and the school’s dominant ideology” (Bills et al., 2017, p. 5).

In other words, what presented across the interviews as quite remarkable was the ready acceptance and engagement of the teachers with STEAM, which was fostered by leader and researcher strategic attunement to ensure the best from the past was brought into the new organisational reframing for the future. Organisational storylines are never linear or singular (Giles, 2015). For example, closer inspection of the Lazarus storyline reveals that the emergence of a new STEAM ideology of schooling represented a break from the dominant ideology of doing schooling in South Australia. Lazarus became the first STEAM school in South Australia. When new ideologies of schooling become embodied by leaders, new aspirations and intentions that build upon a school’s storyline can manifest. Therefore, in the context of this research, the leaders and teachers understanding of a new philosophy of STEAM in public education became more important and more challenging than ever before. They were all grappling with this new philosophy across the interviews. The component theory approach used in the analysis of the data enabled the new ideology of education at Lazarus to be seen as an interplay of various component theories.

Significant components of education which were considered hermeneutically from the leader and teacher interviews undertaken in this research. We positioned these components as (1) schooling purposes (2) school structure, (3) school culture, and (4) school pedagogical/curricular components. These components are illustrated in Figure 1, highlighting the key STEAM component moves underway at Lazarus.

Figure 1.

For “Lazarus” Secondary School, the hope of finding a competitive edge in a “survival of the fittest” schooling marketplace became a living reality when agents with high stakeholder power and influence were activated through university-led action research with a social entrepreneurial flavour to incite a school community’s embrace of becoming a STEAM school (Weerawardena & Sullivan Mort, 2001). The school leaders and teachers saw reason for radical schooling change and in large part welcomed the school’s new purpose and vision, despite the hard work they acknowledged as needed to reposition their professional selves in their teaching and learning endeavours with young people and with each other.

For school leaders in other schools, a key learning in this case study is to always “see” student learning engagement as a key indicative feature of schooling success or lack thereof. When learning engagement is found to be waning, the parent community starts talking and the extended community “grapevine” eventually hears a negative schooling message that will cause them to “vote with their feet” in terms of future schooling enrolment. To avoid these situations, school leadership must embrace an ongoing culture of research and inquiry (Reid, 2018) with critical stakeholders in tow to help reinvigorate the project of schooling before all is lost.

Organisational change to radically overhaul a school’s modus operandi can seem near impossible unless key actors and relationships are activated to support the change. The motivation can come from several areas; national policy driven mandates (for example, AHS with its STEM agenda), leaders who see the need and who are courageous enough to “put their career on the line” out of care for the learning needs of their community (Bills et. al, 2017) or in the case of Lazarus, schools facing impending closure. Through a relationally attuned action research endeavour, “Lazarus” became the first public education STEAM school in South Australia, promised ten million dollars of government funding to do their regeneration work. Teacher and leader interview accounts of how they made sense of their new ideological STEAM schooling trajectory following a parent vote to stay open indicated a “seeing-ness” of the need for change and an overall willingness to embrace the change. This willingness was due to (1) an acceptance by staff and parents that no change meant certain closure and (2) the strategy behind the STEAM ideological shift valued school success from the past and recognised this in a new schooling form for the future. In all of this, “time” and “timing” is of the essence for renewed professional teacher and student growth at Lazarus.