Using institutional ethnography and students’ voices to explore capacity to learn

Abstract

As a response to declining student results on certain academic measures, a great deal of government policy intervention in Australia and internationally has been directed towards correcting a perceived deficit in teachers. Such interventions deliberately ignore the possibility that other factors might also be impacting student learning. The study reported here employed Institutional ethnography (IE) to begin from the standpoint of students, across all secondary year groups, and trace the factors that students perceive influence their capacity to learn. The voices of these students provided new and surprising insights to teachers and to the school executive. Surprising in the sense that other large scale, institutionalised data collection methods had not revealed the factors considered important by students. The study demonstrated the efficacy of an IE approach to student voice in uncovering a broad range of student views.