We Fight Alongside You: Teacher Educators, Agency, and Strategic Resistance to Teacher Performance Assessments

• In Event: 56.049 - Preparing Candidates to Fight Back: Enacting Justice-Oriented Agency in Neoliberal Times

Abstract

Objectives & Theoretical Framework
Teacher education is under assault and, as justice-oriented teacher educators, so are we. Politicians, self-appointed (and privately-funded) “watchdogs” like the National Council on Teacher Quality, and accrediting bodies like NCATE (now CAEP) have made an industry out of the regulation, policing, and evaluation of university-based teacher education. Central to this assault is the rise of high-stakes, standardized, teacher performance assessments (TPAs) that are reshaping the landscape of teacher education. In addition to reinforcing a narrow and counter-critical framework, TPAs can shift responsibility for teacher evaluation from university-based teacher educators with a comprehensive and nuanced fluency in candidates' preparedness, to external “scorers” trained to standardize, and depersonalize effective practice.

In this paper, social justice-oriented teacher educators from three different states examine the practical and political effects of TPAs in our local contexts. Our focus is on the curricular, pedagogical, and political implications of this high-stakes standardization of our field, and the choices we have made in the face of critical dilemmas of practice. Throughout, we examine the dilemmas of practice created by TPAs, as teachers and teacher educators seek to redefine what it means to enact professional agency in an increasingly regulated context.

Methods & Data Sources
In order to examine and make meaning of the choices we have made as justice-oriented teacher educators interacting with TPAs, we utilized narrative inquiry to collect and process our own lived stories and then to collaboratively reflect upon each other’s personal/professional experiences with TPAs. Narrative inquiry, as a form of autoethnography, challenges traditional modes of inquiry and treats research as an expression of “an ongoing experiential text” (p. 4 , Connelly & Clandinin, 1990) and a political, socially-just and socially-conscious act (Adams & Holman Jones, 2008).

This paper draws upon written autoethnographic narratives from each of the four authors. We collected, analyzed and coded the narratives to identify central themes. We also triangulated the narratives by examining artifacts from each author, including syllabi, lesson plans, personal journals, email communication, departmental documents, communication with national organizations, and statewide directives.

Results & Significance
Through our analysis, we identified several strategies for enacting agency in response to TPAs, including curricular acts of resistance, resistance through politics in state legislature, policymaking within teacher education programs, the production of activist scholarship, and refusal to participate at all. In the full paper, we examine each of these themes, using data from participants’ narratives to illustrate the complexities, tensions, and outcomes associated with each strategy.

A growing number of justice-oriented scholars detail their many critiques of TPAs (e.g. Author et al., 2015; Berlak, 2010; Tuck & Gorlewski, 2016) and their impact on the preparation and evaluation of candidates who are ready to assume a social justice orientation in their classes, enact professional agency, and respond to the unique needs of their students and communities. This study not only further details the threats posed by these mandates, but also suggests ways in which teacher educators might minimize, mitigate and resist the impact of TPAs through curricular, political, and scholarly activism.

Authors

• Erica K. Dotson, Clayton State University

• Alison G Dover, California State University - Fullerton

• Nick Henning, California State University - Fullerton

• Ruchi Agarwal-Rangnath, University of San Francisco