The Strangling: New Teachers and the Professional Learning Community

• In Event: Sunday Roundtable Session 1:15 pm
  In Roundtable Session: Socially Just Education (Table 26)

Abstract

Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) once thought to enhance the teaching profession by allowing individual teachers to experiment, be observed, gain feedback, and read and discuss the latest research have become mechanisms of control. This is particularly true of the new teacher often concerned about contract renewal and heavily influenced by more senior members of their departments, teacher independence and creativity, rather than supported and encouraged, particularly in areas of a justice oriented and more critical approaches to teaching are often extinguished. Borrowing data from a larger, longitudinal, multi-year, multi-case study examines how new self-identifying social justice social studies teachers were influenced by and attempted to resist the strangle hold of the Professional Learning Community as they experienced them.

Authors

• Brian C. Gibbs, Georgia College & State University

• Kristin L. Papoi, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill