Building Foundations for Principled Resistance

• In Event: 67.045 - Principled Resistance: How Teachers Resolve Ethical Dilemmas

Abstract

Purpose
Teaching is unpredictable and complex. Wide gulfs separate principles and intentions from the reality of day-to-day classroom practice.1 Many teachers struggling to negotiate workplace dilemmas, find that their hands are pedagogically tied and innovative ideas dismissed. Administrators and even colleagues exert pressures on teachers to fall in line and implement externally-imposed curriculum.2 Like Giroux, we understand curriculum and education as “terrain[s] of struggle...shot through with ethical considerations.” For this reason, educators must not ignore these struggles, but study them, publicly resisting as necessary.

Theoretical framework
Deborah Meyerson informs our thinking, describing “tempered radicals” as “everyday leaders” who foster incremental change from within their organizations. Their actions can be small, such as “refusing to silence aspects of themselves that make them different from the majority” or large, such as working “deliberately to change the way [their] organization does things” or “organizing collective action.” The session incorporates examples of teachers writing illustrating the framework.

Methods
Qualitative content analysis is used to analyze teachers’ writings from the National Writing Project Institute.

Evidence
This study reflects an analysis of data collected over three years from participants in a year-long National Writing Project (NWP) Invitational Institute, called Leadership in the Teaching of Writing. The institute included cohorts of fifteen to twenty educators, with different areas of subject matter expertise and experience. Beginning in May and ending in April, the institute had a blended learning format with twenty, day-long class meetings and cycles of non-synchronous activities.

Substantiated conclusions
The authors, who co-facilitated the institute, believe that teachers engaged in professional development with writing at its core, can build self-knowledge, pursue a principled practice, and resist unjust curriculum and policies that encroach on their professional wisdom, and leadership. The session highlights an emergent conceptual framework, drawing on James Moffett’s conception of “discourse distances,” in which writers write first for themselves, then for trusted others, and, finally, for unknown others.

We urge teachers to write, examine, and reexamine stories they tell about themselves as learners and teachers, while also focusing on their students’ experience of learning. The process of “professional writing” enables participants to gain practice articulating their beliefs as Yagelski explains; “Writing both shapes and reflects our sense of who we are in relation to each other and the world around us” Over the course of the year, participants read excerpts from freshly written pieces, as well as mid-process and finished pieces they have worked on with peer writing groups.

Significance
Teachers’ writing amidst others may allow the writers to gain author-ity in this age of policy encroachment, where teachers’ professional voices are silenced. Dilemmas of practice are often wedded to particular contexts and specific people, leaving many teachers fearful of overstepping real or perceived professional roles and repercussions.

Author

• Tom Meyer, SUNY - College at New Paltz