Disorienting Discourses: School Reform Mandates and Teachers' Orientations to Professional Development Learning

• In Event: 75.042 - MTCC Roundtable Session 34
  In Roundtable Session: 75.042-10 - Hanging Onto Truths: Why Language Must Remain Key to the Study of Social Learning Processes

Abstract

The stakes are high for teachers who work under shifting reform mandates to improve student performance on short timelines (Avila, Zacher, Griffo, & Pearson, 2011). To meet these demands, many teachers turn to professional development (PD) as a primary means of accessing learning that can support instructional change (Avalos, 2011). Both reform mandates and PD present teachers with orienting discourses (Rex, 2001, 2002), or expectations about the purpose of professional learning and their role in that learning. Using a telling case (Mitchell, 1983, 1984), I illustrate the shaping influence and intersection of school reform and PD orienting discourses. Understanding how these often divergent discourses differently position teachers to take up (or not) ongoing professional learning offers a new explanation for longstanding questions about why teachers are often stymied, despite their motivation and the quality of PD content, to take up and apply PD learning.

I apply Rex’s (2002) theory of orienting discourses to study professional learning as a “gradual process of emergent social acts” (p. 278) within evolving teaching and learning contexts. Drawing as Rex did on Gee’s (1996) theorization of socioliteracy, teacher selves are social positions created and recreated through a relationship between local (small d) discourses and macro (capital D) discourses that produce opportunities for teachers to be and become certain kinds of people. This view provides a way of accounting for the fact that teachers assume different identities within the various contexts where they work and learn. Orientating discourses offer a useful construct for understanding how school reform mandates intersect with PD in positioning teachers to assume different identities, and drawing on Bordieu’s (1977) habitus and theory of principled action, take action.

Analysis of data drawn from a three-year interactional ethnography illustrates the challenges Robin (pseudonym), a black history teacher who taught at a predominately black urban high school, faced as she sought to negotiate divergent orienting discourses. Reform discourses at her school were shaped by state mandates to improve student literacy performance or face closure. School leaders who led efforts to meet these mandates positioned Robin as a teacher leader who was capable of finding quick-fix solutions; she simply needed to implement them. Professional learning discourses in a national disciplinary literacy PD program positioned Robin as a teacher leader and expert historian. In the teacher research team at her school, Robin was positioned as an inquirer who questioned her teaching practice. As she sought to make decisions about whether and how to apply PD learning, she was implicitly tasked with negotiating these divergent discourses. The incongruence between these discourses stymied Robin’s ability to act. The result was that PD leaders inaccurately read her as resistant to change, and she questioned her abilities. Making visible how reform and PD orienting discourses intersect to influence teachers’ abilities to act on professional learning holds promise in disrupting dominant narratives that oversimplify teaching and teacher learning and that perpetuate public perception that school reform is as simple as telling teachers what to do.

Author

• Danielle Lillge, Illinois State University