The "Dream School"? The Consequences of Functioning Over Time in a Dysfunctional System

• In Event: 52.058 - Teaching for Equity in Complex Times: Negotiating the Common Core State Standards in a High-Performing Bilingual School

Abstract

This conceptual paper unfolds in three sections. First, the authors present their theoretical framework (CHAT), focusing on its underlying assumptions concerning the role of culture and context in learning (Cole & Engeström, 1997: Engeström, 1987). They then address its particular utility for a) illuminating how policy-related artifacts, local norms, and community members mediate bilingual teachers’ interpretations and enactments of the CCSS, as well as teachers’ learning, and b) positioning tension, contradiction, and/or conflict as natural, even generative byproducts of human interaction—namely, in this case, interaction involved in teaching, learning, and engaging with policy.

Second, the authors underscore the importance of historicity, especially for studying teachers’ engagement with contemporary policy and its impact on their professional identities and classroom practices. Using the focal school site as an organizing example and tracing its journey from inception as a “dream school” following the passage of Proposition 227, to its early days of being labeled “low-performing,” to its eventual, but tenuous, attainment of “high-performing” status, the authors theorize a kind of post-traumatic (or ‘chronic-traumatic’) stress syndrome and related achiever (‘no failing’) ethos and survivor (‘phoenix’) identity that mediated teachers’ engagement with policy. Indeed, enduring such a journey—or even just joining a school so self-defined by its ‘rise from the ashes’ accountability narrative—seemed to confer a kind of angst and urgency in terms of pushing harder and harder to achieve and to ward off “failure” as dictated by the accountability context. This ethos and collective identity, in turn, encouraged among teachers the tendency to ‘get out in front’ of reforms like the CCSS—to “do it to ourselves” (as a few teachers put it) rather than having others (like the state or district) “tell us how to do it.” Given the issues of (self-) surveillance and (self-)discipline that such sentiments invoke, the authors borrow from Foucault’s (1975) theory of panopticism to complicate their account of how power circulates under current accountability regimes and how its circulation mediates teachers’ agency in relation to CCSS implementation in particular.

Third, the authors consider some of the challenges that these dynamics pose for researchers, specifically. For instance, if teachers’ historical, cultural and social positioning vis-à-vis policy presses them toward uncritical and/or self-initiated compliance with state mandates, then this has implications for the kinds of tensions, contradictions, and/or conflicts—for example, between instructional autonomies and curricular mandates, or between educational goals and market demands—likely to emerge (or not) in the research context. Indeed, recent research in the U.K. suggests that teachers’ compliance with the state can fuel standardization and “suppress” the emergence of a “context of criticism” (Ellis, 2014). As a result, tensions, contradictions, and/or conflicts that are endemic to any activity system may become less visible—a concerning condition for teachers and researchers alike. In light of this, the authors close with several theoretically-informed recommendations and questions for researchers to consider as they study teachers and teaching, particularly in places where accountability policy has influenced local norms and practices powerfully over the last few decades.

Author

• Lauren M. Anderson, Connecticut College