Teachers Working Together to Resist and Remake Educational Policy

• In Event: 35.061 - Platforms of Resistance in the Lives of Teachers Past and Present

Abstract

This presentation draws on scholarship that conceives of teachers as fundamental to the policymaking process. In line with this perspective, this study situates teachers as agents or authors of educational policy through their participation in the workplace. In so doing, the study acknowledges the creative and strategic manifestations of resistance as ongoing negotiations between agency and structure embedded within the multifaceted ecology of teachers’ working lives (Ball, 2003, Emirbayer & Mische, 1998, Gitlin & Margonis, 1995; and Honan, 2004). According to this scholarship, teachers engage in purposeful and generative activity as they make sense of and implement policy initiatives.

Those examining the role teachers of language minority students play in the educational policy-making process have found that their autonomy has been threatened within the context of an environment characterized by increasing standardization. This environment is reflected in rigid one-size fits all curricular mandates focused on the learning of discrete skills in the national language, enforced high-stakes standardized testing, and external monitoring (e.g., Achinstein & Ogawa, 2006; Luke, 2011; Pease-Alvarez & Samway, 2008; Pease-Alvarez & Samway, 2012). In light of the pervasive nature of this policy environment, we are heartened by our experiences working with a teacher collective in Northern California that has resisted policies of standardization aimed at requiring them to teach and assess students in ways that ignore students’ instructional needs, interests, and experiences. As members of the collective, the authors draw on participatory and ethnographic approaches to describe how teacher resistance and agency are implicated in the educational policy-making processes, paying special attention to the way group members conceive of and enact relationships with one another and other educational stakeholders. We tap a range of data sources, including field notes of group meetings, e-mail correspondence among group members, media accounts of the group’s activities, and interviews and small-group discussions with group members.

In providing a detailed description of group efforts focused on resisting district and state testing mandates, analyses of these data sources focus on members’ views on what has helped and hindered the group in its efforts to change oppressive policies and working conditions as well as their perspectives on the role they think they should assume in bringing about change in their schools and districts. The presenters will emphasize how group members conceive of the relationships that the group should assume with other educational stakeholders, including the teachers’ union, community organizations focused on school reform, and school and district administration. The group has managed to work as a collective with some group members sometimes appropriating the ideologies and hierarchies of those in authority and others openly defying them. Still other group members often assume a pragmatic perspective that accommodates a range of tactics. In addition to discussing how our findings contribute to a dynamic and complex view of the role teacher agency and resistance play in the educational policy-making process, the presenters will discuss the implications of their findings for promoting teacher education that is both agentive and situated within the context of teachers’ working lives.

Authors

• Lucinda Pease Alvarez, University of California - Santa Cruz

• Alisun Thompson, University of California - Santa Cruz