Talk, texts, and educational action: an institutional ethnography of policy in practice

Educational governance is a textually‐organized relation only accomplished in the coordinated actions of people as they go about their everyday work. We bring this relation into view by tracing Canadian principals’ and parents’ descriptions of their educational work in the policy‐mediated settings of public schooling in British Columbia, Canada. This paper describes the policy‐driven data collection and analysis practices that are taken up by principals and parents on local School Planning Councils. Our institutional ethnography focuses on the moments when people’s talk meets provincial policy texts. We describe how parents’ and principals’ descriptions of their work for schooling occur against a backdrop of education and accountability generated provincially. We argue that the current managerial turn in public education coordinates the everyday activities of local schooling and parenting. As parents and educators learn to speak this new managerial discourse, their understanding of schooling shifts away from local concerns and toward the extra‐local concerns of political accountability.