Reconsidering What edTPA Makes Matter: Implementing edTPA Inside Commitments to Culturally Sustaining Teaching Practice

• In Event: Roundtable Session 9
  In Roundtable Session: Teacher Performance Assessments: Comparing Benefits and Drawbacks

Abstract

Our teacher education program is currently implementing the new assessment of teacher performance, edTPA. We do so in a particular context—inside statewide conversations about democratizing the teaching force and our own commitments to educating teachers-to-be as social justice activists—and as opportunity for program evaluation, alignment, and recommitment to founding principles. We do not want to teach to the test, and we do not want our students to fail. In this paper, we examine our implementation of this assessment using Barad’s concept of the apparatus, which provokes us to consider what edTPA makes matter and under what conditions to contest the naturalization of narrow conceptions of teaching practice and sustain the paradox of holding to standards while resisting standardization.

Authors

• Juliet A. Baxter, University of Oregon

• Julia Irene Heffernan, University of Oregon

• Courtney L. Rath, Universty of Oregon