Language at work in education: An exploratory study of educational professionals' sensemaking about media reports involving blame.

This paper reports on a study which explored language at work in the sensemaking of educational professionals. We investigated the way education professionals from four schools in one geographic area in New Zealand made sense of newspaper articles that addressed responsibility and accountability in education. Semi-structured interviews were undertaken to gather data on how teachers made sense of these articles and how this sense affected their professional practice. The analysis revealed that four interpretative repertoires were used when making sense of the print media examples. These repertoires were labelled defensive, empathetic, cynical and collaborative. We discuss what these repertoires reveal about the way print media impacts on the education professionals' thinking and subsequent behaviour and the implications of the study for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]