"Doing Teaching" Through Spatially Situated Interactions: The Case of Hallway Spaces and Teachers' Occupational Communities

• In Event: Fairmont Roundtable Session Three
  In Roundtable Session: Advancing Organizational Theory in Education: Institutional Logics, Critical Sense-Making, and the Social Organization of Schools (Table 16)

Abstract

Research outside of education on occupational communities has shown how occupational knowledge, shared values, and a sense of belonging are cultivated through social interaction. Our 15-month, ethnographic study of interactions of high school teachers in hallways shows the importance of public workspaces – namely, hallways – for developing an occupational community and enacting occupational values (i.e., what it means to be a good teacher). We find that, despite organizational similarities between teachers in two public high schools in one city in the Southeastern U.S., teachers’ enactments of “doing teaching” – in tangible, symbolic, and evaluative ways – rested on the different ways membership and values were constructed in each respective occupational community.

Authors

• Jennifer Lauren Nelson, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
  Presenting Author

• Beth Bechky, University of California - Davis
  Non-Presenting Author

• Anne-Laure Fayard, NOVA School of Business and Economics
  Non-Presenting Author