2 resultados para teachers educators kindergarten - power relationships conflict - established and outsiders
em Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship Repository
Resumo:
This study positioned the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2002 as a reified colonizing entity, inscribing its hegemonic authority upon the professional identity and work of school principals within their school communities of practice. Pressure on educators and students intensifies each year as the benchmark for Adequate Yearly Progress under the NCLB policy is raised, resulting in standards-based reform, scripted curriculum and pedagogy, absence of elective subjects, and a general lack of autonomy critical to the work of teachers as they approach each unique class and student (Crocco & Costigan, 2007; Mabry & Margolis, 2006). Emphasis on high stakes standardized testing as the indicator for student achievement (Popham, 2005) affects educators professional identity through dramatic pedagological and structural changes in schools (Day, Flores, & Viana, 2007). These dramatic changes to the ways our nation conducts schooling must be understood and thought about critically from school leaders perspectives as their professional identity is influenced by large scale NCLB school reform. The author explored the impact No Child Left Behind reform had on the professional identity of fourteen, veteran Illinois principals leading in urban, small urban, suburban, and rural middle and elementary schools. Qualitative data were collected during semi-structured interviews and focus groups and analyzed using a dual theoretical framework of postcolonial and identity theories. Postcolonial theory provided a lens from which the author applied a metaphor of colonization to principals experiences as colonized-colonizers in a time of school reform. Principal interview data illustrated many examples of NCLB as a colonizing authority having a significant impact on the professional identity of school leaders. This framework was used to interpret data in a unique and alternative way and contributed to the need to better understand the ways school leaders respond to district-level, state-level, and national-level accountability policies (Sloan, 2000). Identity theory situated principals as professionals shaped by the communities of practice in which they lead. Principals professional identity has become more data-driven as a result of NCLB and their role as instructional leaders has intensified. The data showed that NCLB has changed the work and professional identity of principals in terms of use of data, classroom instruction, Response to Intervention, and staffing changes. Although NCLB defines success in terms of meeting or exceeding the benchmark for Adequate Yearly Progress, principals view AYP as only one measurement of their success. The need to meet the benchmark for AYP is a present reality that necessitates school-wide attention to reading and math achievement. At this time, principals leading in affluent, somewhat homogeneous schools typically experience less pressure and more power under NCLB and are more often labeled successful school communities. In contrast, principals leading in schools with more heterogeneity experience more pressure and lack of power under NCLB and are more often labeled failing school communities. Implications from this study for practitioners and policymakers include a need to reexamine the intents and outcomes of the policy for all school communities, especially in terms of power and voice. Recommendations for policy reform include moving to a growth model with multi-year assessments that make sense for individual students rather than one standardized test score as the measure for achievement. Overall, the study reveals enhancements and constraints NCLB policy has caused in a variety of school contexts, which have affected the professional identity of school leaders.
Resumo:
When writing teachers enter the classroom, they often bring with them a deep faith in the power of literacy to rectify social inequalities and improve their students social and economic standing. It is this faiththis hope for changethat draws some writing teachers to locations of social and economic hardship. I am interested in how teachers and theorists construct their own narratives of social mobility, possibility, and literacy. My dissertation analyzes the production and expression of beliefs about literacy in the narratives of a diverse group of writing teachers and theorists, from those beginning their careers to those who are published and widely read. The central questions guiding this study are: How do teachers and theorists narratives of becoming literate intersect with literacy theories? and How do such literacy narratives intersect with beliefs in the power of literacy to improve individuals lives socially, economically, and personally? I contend that the professional literature needs to address more fully how teachers and theorists personal histories with literacy shape what they see as possible (and desirable) for students, especially those from marginalized communities. A central focus of the dissertation is on how teachers and theorists attempt to resolve a paradox they are likely to encounter in narratives about literacy. On one hand, they are immersed in a popular culture that cherishes narrative links between literacy and economic advancement (and, further, between such advancement and a good life). On the other hand, in professional discourse and in teacher preparation courses, they are likely to encounter narratives that complicate an assumed causal relationship between literacy and economic progress. Understanding, through literacy narratives, how teachers and theorists chart a practical path through or around this paradox can be beneficial to literacy education in three ways. First, it can offer direction in professional development and teacher education, addressing how teachers negotiate the boundaries between personal experience, theory, and pedagogy. Second, it can help teachers create spaces wherein students can explore the impact of paradoxical views about the role of literacy on their own lives. Finally, it can offer direction in public policy discourse, extending awareness of what we wantand needfrom English language arts education in the twenty-first century. To explore these issues, I draw on case studies and ethnographic observation as well as narrative inquiry into teachers and theorists published literacy narratives. I situate my findings within three interrelated frames: 1) the narratives of new teachers, 2) the published works of literacy educators and theorists, and 3) my own literacy narrative. My first chapter, Beyond Hope, explores the tenuous connections between hope and critique in literacy studies and provides a methodological overview of the study. I argue that scholarship must move beyond a singular focus on either hope or critique in order to identify the transformative potential of literacy in particular circumstances. Analyzing literacy narratives provides a way of locating a critically informed sense of possibility. My second chapter, Making Teachers, Making Literacy, explores the intersection between teachers lives and the theories they study, based on qualitative analysis of a preservice course for secondary education English teachers. I examine how these preservice English teachers understood literacy, how their narratives of becoming literate and teaching English connectedand did not connectwith theoretical and pedagogical positions, and how these stories might inform their future work as practitioners. Centering primarily on preservice teachers who resisted Nancie Atwells pedagogy of possibility because they found it too good to be true, this research concentrates on moments of disjuncture, as expressed in class discussion and in one-on-one interviews, when literacy theories failed to align with aspiring teachers understandings of their own experiences and also with what they imagined as possible in disadvantaged educational settings. In my third and fourth chapters, I analyze the narratives of celebrated teachers and theorists who put forth an agenda that emphasizes possibilities through literacy, examining how they negotiate the relationship between their own literacy stories and literacy theories. Specifically, I investigate the narratives of three proponents of critical literacy: Mike Rose, Paulo Freire, and Myles Horton, all highly respected literacy teachers whose working-class backgrounds influenced their commitment to teaching in disenfranchised communities. In chapter 3, Reading Lives on the Boundary, I demonstrate how Mike Roses 1989 autobiographical text, Lives on the Boundary, juxtaposes rhetorics of mobility with critiques of such possibility. Through an analysis of work published in professional journals, I offer a reception history of Roses narrative, focusing specifically on how teachers have negotiated the tension between hope and critique. I follow this analysis with three case studies, drawn from a larger sampling, that inquire into the personal connections that writing teachers make with Lives on the Boundary. The teachers in this study, who provided written responses and participated in audio-recorded follow-up interviews, were asked to compare Roses story to their own stories, considering how their personal literacy histories influenced their teaching. My findings illustrate how a group of teachers and theorists have projected their own assessments of what literacy and higher education can and cannot accomplish onto this influential text. In my fourth chapter, Horton and Freires Road as Literacy Narrative, I concentrate on Myles Horton and Paulo Freires 1990 collaborative spoken book, We Make the Road by Walking. Central to my analysis are the educators stories about their formative years, including their own primary and secondary education experiences. I argue that We Make the Road by Walking demonstrates how theories of literacy cannot be divorced from personal histories. I begin by examining the spoken book as a literacy narrative that fuses personal and theoretical knowledge, focusing specifically on its authors ideas on theory. Drawing on Bakhtins notion of the chronotopethe intersection of time and space within narrativeI then explore the literacy narratives emerging from the production process of the book, in a video production about Horton and Freires meeting, and ultimately in the two mens reflections on their childhood years (Dialogic). Interspersed with these accounts is archival material on the books editorial production that illustrates the value of increased dialogue between personal history and theories of literacy. My fifth chapter is both a reflective analysis and a qualitative study of my work at a mens medium-high security prison in Illinois, where I conducted research and served as the instructor of an upper-level writing course, Writing for a Change, in the spring of 2009. Entitled Doing Time with Literacy Narratives, this chapter explores the complex ways in which literacy and incarceration are configured in students narratives as well as my own. With and against students stories, I juxtapose my own experiences with literacy, particularly in relation to being the son of an imprisoned father. In exploring the intersections between such stories, I demonstrate how literacy narratives can function as a heuristic for exploring beliefs about literacy between teachers and students both inside and outside of the prison-industrial complex. My conclusion pulls together the various themes that emerged in the three frames, from the making of new teachers to the published literacy narratives of teachers and theorists to my own literacy narrative. Writing teachers encounter considerable pressure to align their curricula with one or another theory of literacy, which has the effect of negating the authority of knowledge about literacy gleaned from experience as readers and writers. My dissertation contends that there is much to be gained by finding ways of articulating theories of literacy that encompass teachers knowledge of reading and writing as expressed in personal narratives of literacy. While powerful cultural rhetorics of upward social mobility often neutralize the critical potential of teachers own narratives of literacypotential that has been documented by scholars in writing studies and allied disciplinesthis is not always the case. The chapters in this dissertation offer evidence that hopeful and critical positions on the transformational possibilities of literacy are not mutually exclusive.
