Moral Victories: Institutional Experience, Moral Socialization, and Definitions of Student Success across Teacher Careers

• In Event: 523 - Section on Sociology of Education Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 03.The Role and Influence of Teachers: Session I

Abstract

Amidst the changing and varied meanings of student success in public education, surprisingly little research directly examines the definitions of success prevalent among teachers or how teachers construct meanings about student success. We attempt to shed light on this set of issues with analysis of the meanings about success that teachers develop over the course of their careers, and how these definitions find expression through the instructional practices they develop over time. Combining interview data with public and private schoolteachers across career stages (what we call novice, second stage, and veteran teachers) with ethnographic data on a university-based teacher education program, we examine the institutionalized ideals that shape teachers’ definitions of student success and how teachers develop these definitions as they accumulate experience working in educational institutions. Among our findings, we show how teachers actively reaffirm unequal student outcomes as similarly successful outcomes, revealing a key way in which schools serve to legitimate inequality.

Authors

• Judson G. Everitt, Loyola University Chicago

• Nathalia Hernandez Vidal

• Quintin A Williams, Loyola University Chicago