This book explores the experiences and key contributions of educational paraprofessionals to schools and the education of young people, focusing on learning mentors in state secondary schools in northern England. It describes the roles of education paraprofessionals and learning mentors, the political environment, and comparisons to learning mentor roles in the US. It then provides an ethnographic study of a specific school, detailing the history of the school, the formal aspects of the learning mentor role, unofficial aspects of their work, how the role is understood by school leadership, and how learning mentors manage, acquiesce, and resist official prescriptions of their work, as well as the challenges they face. Distributed in North America by Turpin Distribution. Annotation ©2022 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)
Drawing on an ethnography conducted in a state secondary school, this book provides a critical examination of the role and practice of educational paraprofessionals, focusing on the learning mentor. It explores the lived reality of their work and how these ‘new’ roles are framed within more established discourses like ‘pastoral care’.
Much has been written about ‘performativity’ and the ‘audit culture’ in relation to the teaching profession, but this literature has been neglectful of how these might impact educational paraprofessionals. Informed by Institutional Ethnography, this book provides a critical examination of the role, practices and everyday work experiences of educational paraprofessionals. Taking the learning mentor in English state secondary education as its starting point, the study then draws on international, historical literature to trace the genealogy of this role and examines the legacy of the paraprofessional movement in 1960s USA. Ultimately, the question of the adequacy of short-term policy initiatives in the face of intractable social inequalities is explored.
