Teachers, Social Media, and Policy: Rethinking Street-Level Bureaucracy in a Digital Age

• In Event: 65.074 - Policy to Practice and Back Again: How Policy Influences Teachers and Teachers Influence Policy

Abstract

Teachers use social media and online news outlets to engage with education reforms. This includes critiquing and supporting Common Core Curriculum, Race to the Top Fund, and new teacher evaluations. The purpose of this project is to explore teachers’ digital policy engagements as spaces of boundary work – the negotiation in local spaces of globe-trotting ideas and policies about education and education work that unsettle national educational and professional projects (Seddon, Ozga, & Levin, 2013). This presentation is particularly concerned with examining what policies teachers in six different US cities chose to engage with and their perspectives of the policies discussed. In other words, what policies are teachers writing about? What are their beliefs (Pajares, 1992) about the relationship of those policies to their work? And, finally, when compared and contrasted what might be learned about the ways that US teachers’ engage with neoliberal education reform and the transformation of teachers’ work at local and national levels?
Teachers’ boundary work potentially transforms the ways teachers engage with and enact policy. Teachers were conceptually framed as street-level bureaucrats who interpret and implement policy based on their value judgments, coping mechanisms, and loop holes or ambiguities within rules or systems (Lipsky, 1980). And we framed teachers’ online postings as textual and discursive manifestations of boundary work where they negotiated the meaning of policies in relation to their work. By intertwining these two conceptual frameworks, we set out to further theorize teachers’ policy engagement in a new space: the Internet.
The data presented are drawn from the first phase of a two-year virtual ethnography (Boellstorff, Nardi, Pearce, & Taylor, 2012; Hine, 2000) of 60 US public school teachers’ policy protagonism in virtual spaces (active engagement with policy texts and discourses beyond the confines of street-level bureaucracy or the everyday workplace). Participants are policy fellows who completed 1.5 years of Teach Plus, “a highly selective program for teachers (with 2-10 years experience) interested in having a voice in decisions that affect their profession” (2014). The data are blog postings, You Tube videos, and articles from local and national online newspapers. Using critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 2010; Luke, 2002), we found that teachers primarily limited their critique of reforms to local policies. Teachers in Washington, DC, however, linked policies that affected their classroom practice to federal mandates, a finding that merits further consideration. The preliminary data analysis suggests a parsing of teacher “publics” into small, localized communities. For our presentation, we will put these preliminary findings in conversation with street-level bureaucracy (Lipsky, 1980; Watkins-Hayes, 2009) in a virtual space.
This presentation contributes to conversations regarding street-level bureaucracy, a robust multi-disciplinary concern that in recent times has not included consideration of teachers’ street-level policy work. The presentation illuminates how teachers across the US are inserting their beliefs into public discourse surrounding educational reform with implications for teachers’ collective action. Finally, the presentation aims to broaden the spaces in which teachers’ policy engagement and enactments are sought and the ways they can be analyzed.

Authors

• Sarah A. Robert, University at Buffalo - SUNY

• Leah M. Reed, University at Buffalo - SUNY