With All Due Respect: An Anarchist edTPA Primer

• In Event: Students Resisting the edTPA: How Future Teachers Are Supporting Diverse Democracies

Abstract

1. Objectives & Theoretical Framework

Pearson, Inc., claims that the edTPA is based on findings that successful teachers “develop knowledge of subject-specific pedagogy" and "develop and apply knowledge of varied students' needs" (SCALE, 2014). However, critics of the edTPA contend that it is an inaccurate measure of pre-service teachers' abilities, that it removes teaching and learning from meaningful contexts, and that it sets forth a reductive definition of "competence" based on a narrow and standardized list of artificial criteria (Au, 2013; Cochran-Smith, Piazza & Powers, 2013). Other critics have identified the edTPA as an aspect of a neoliberal education reform agenda that de-professionalizes teachers, undermines public institutions, and subjects education to the logic of the marketplace (Brass, 2015).

In this paper, a secondary ELA teacher educator analyzes the wide-ranging and deleterious effects on an urban university's teacher education program as it has been transformed to accommodate the edTPA mandate. In addition, this paper will explore how the program’s instructors and pre-service teachers are resisting the edTPA’s effect of creating compliant political subjects. While these forms of resistance include appeals to state educational policymakers and direct opposition via institutional channels, they also include non-institutional, serendipitous, and grass-roots acts of non-compliance that are consistent with the anarchist tradition of opposition to dominant forces.

2. Methods & Data Collection

The teacher education program that is the subject of this paper is located in a state in which a passing score on the edTPA will be required for teacher licensure beginning in the 2015-2016 academic year. The program transformation in response to this mandate is being documented through participant observation, and data collection includes syllabi of revised courses, assignments designed to mimic the three edTPA performative "tasks," and interviews with instructors and students focusing on the attitudinal outcomes of extensive edTPA preparation.

Other data, however, include instructors' and students' own written accounts of the ways in which they sought to undermine the edTPA. Many of these efforts can be characterized as "everyday" forms of resistance that, while stopping short of collective noncompliance, are similar to what the anthropologist and political theorist James C. Scott (1987) has called "the weapons of the weak” – foot dragging, feigned ignorance, sabotage, and cheating. Without the sanction of their university and ignoring Pearson, Inc.'s, insistence that the tasks be completed autonomously, this study's participants are giving the edTPA, in the words of one pre-service teacher, "the respect it deserves" (which is to say, very little), by – among other things – sharing illicit examples of edTPA responses, staging classroom performances, disseminating evaluation criteria intended only for edTPA scorers, and forming writing groups to collectively revise their edTPA dossiers.

3. Results and Significance

The preliminary results of this ongoing study suggest that, despite policy makers’ ignoring appeals to repeal edTPA mandates, resistance to these mandates can (and does) take multiple forms. This study’s documentation of such forms are significant in that they suggest that large-scale efforts of educational engineering are vulnerable to being undermined by those they seek to control.

Authors

• Todd DeStigter, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Russell Mayo, University of Illinois at Chicago