Teacher Collective Sensemaking and Experience with Restrictive Curricular Policy

• In Event: From “Micro” to “Macro”: Exploring Possibilities for Repair in Teacher Credentialing, Evaluation, and Curriculum Policymaking

Abstract

Increasingly, literacy teachers work under surveillance and accountability measures tied to mandated curriculum. This yearlong discourse-analytic ethnography traces a second grade team’s collective sensemaking and experience with such policies. Drawing on critical discourse analysis and post-structural approaches, it examines formal and informal teacher planning sessions and teachers’ reflections and refeelings of these meetings. Preliminary findings suggest structures of curricular fidelity can demoralize teachers and limit sensemaking, while teacher community can support resistance and reinvigoration.

Author

• Michael S. Havazelet, Vanderbilt University