A Narrative Examination of How Teachers' Assumptions and Understandings Shape Intersectional Teaching and Teacher Agency

• In Event: Moscone Center West Roundtable Session 13
  In Roundtable Session: Educators' Experiences Amid Accountability: Fighting for Agency and Autonomy

Abstract

When literature shifts its emphasis to teachers rather than student learning outcomes, discussions of agency and intersectionality become more complex. This paper is situated within these discussions while expanding them in important ways including how intersectionality matters within the classroom space to those teachers occupying multiple sites of privilege through their identities and how their presence in schools that offer curricular autonomy shape their individual agency.

Focusing on two teachers over the course of two academic years, we seek answers to the following research questions, namely, what factors do participants describe as limiting their teacher agency and what factors do they describe as providing and/or increasing teacher agency?

Authors

• Shelly Melchior, University of Alabama

• Stephanie Anne Shelton, The University of Alabama