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Axler, M 
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0008-9389-0722,
2025.
Becoming a school governor as a social practice: exploring digital school governance and governing during the Covid-19 pandemic era.
[Dataset]
Abstract
Becoming a school governor as a social practice is a digital ethnography. The thesis makes original contributions to theory and practice, methodology and policy by exploring how volunteer citizens become school governors. I examine factors that promote or prevent participation in practice in the context of a governing body (GB) and offer a unique lens upon the stresses and strains of becoming a school governor - a process that takes place within an increasingly performative, disciplinary and accountability focussed state education system.
Fieldwork was undertaken during the Covid-19 pandemic. Fieldwork was conducted by means of online naturalistic inquiry, wherein ethnographic methods were employed digitally via mediating technologies (Microsoft Teams). These methods included documentary analysis, online participant observation, online paired interviews, and an online group interview.
Reflexive Thematic Analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2022) of these data, and online paired and group interviews, enabled us to establish a relational understanding of how the digital GBs operated; the way persons-in-the-world become school governors; and factors that promoted or prevented participation in this context. The analysis indicated three themes:
•"Learning-in-governing" interpreted frameworks for governance; the role of mediating technologies in governing; being and becoming a governor via socialisation; and the Pattern of Silence (where power, or lack of power, is enacted via silence).
•"Technology mediating governing in practice" reflected the patterns of introducing and using mediating technology through reflexive descriptions of relationships with technologies.
•"Relations of power shaping learning-in-governing" outlined the patterns of power relations in the GB between the Chair, Headteacher and governors.
The analysis offers a new interpretation of school governors’ learning within the online space – and contributes an original interpretation of learning to the school governance literature. My emphasis on practice enables school GBs (and indeed GBs in both the public and private sectors) to learn from the experiences of the GB we explored. Our methodology meanwhile, contributes to digital ethnography as a means of understanding school governance learning. Lastly, our study contributes to future policy by suggesting that ‘learning as participation’ complements tools aimed at developing governors (and GBs) skills, capabilities and maturity.
I conclude that learning in practice resets the way we understand and undertake learning-in-governing – not only within school GBs, but within any context where governance takes place.
| Item Type: | Research datasets and databases |
|---|---|
| Creators: | Axler, M. |
| Publisher: | Nottingham Trent University |
| Date: | 30 April 2025 |
| Identifiers: | Number Type 10.17631/rd-2025-0011-ddat DOI 2433760 Other |
| Rights: | Data are closed access. Due to the sensitive nature of the research, no interviewees consented to interview data being shared beyond the original research team. |
| Divisions: | Schools > School of Social Sciences |
| Record created by: | Jonathan Gallacher |
| Date Added: | 30 Apr 2025 09:53 |
| Last Modified: | 30 Apr 2025 11:35 |
| URI: | https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/53503 |
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