Inquiry, Policy, Teacher Communities: Countermandates and Teacher Resistance in an Urban School District

• In Event: Pushing Back as a Means of Moving Forward: Disrupting Neoliberal Pedagogical Approaches

Abstract

This paper analyzes the work of two teacher communities working for social change during an era of school reform in Philadelphia and considers how the teachers within these differing contexts theorize, negotiate and respond to mandates. The authors use ethnographic methods and concepts from critical theory, teacher inquiry, and discourse analysis, to analyze the work of two teacher communities - one university master’s course and one voluntary study group. The authors found that the teachers appealed to counter-mandates derived from their personal experience, beliefs about social justice, and outside readings that allowed them to justify alternative actions in the face of top-down directives. This paper contributes to growing bodies of research on city-wide school reform and teacher inquiry communities.

Authors

• Katherine Crawford-Garrett, University of New Mexico

• Kathleen Riley, West Chester University of Pennsylvania