Examining the Policy Enactment of Teacher Portfolios: An Emergence of Critical Consciousness

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 5
  In Roundtable Session: Alliance of Critical Educators and Researchers

Abstract

The policy reform drive to tightly correlate teachers’ learning with pupil outcomes has resulted in the emergence of teacher appraisal systems and mechanisms that prioritise their focus on performativity and narrow modes of public accountability, rather than a generative transformation of practice and mediation with the wider world (Ball, 2003; Brady, 2016; Mezirow, 2000; Sexton, 2007). This mixed methods doctoral study frames the policy enactment of teacher portfolios in the Irish context as a deeply contested construct that involves shifts in teacher’s former understandings, having foundations in critical studies (Freire, 1972) i.e. “problem-posing” education for emancipation through dialogical relations and acts of cognition in the unveiling of reality as a process (rather than static).

Author

• Kathryn Corbett, Bishop Galvin Primary School