How Experience in Educational Institutions Shapes Teachers’ Accounts of Inequality in Student Performance

• In Event: 1211 - The Culture of Schooling

Abstract

Teachers routinely confront vast differences in student performance in the daily life of schools. Yet we know surprisingly little about the meanings teachers construct to account for differences in student performance, or how experience shapes those meanings. Using two complementary sources of qualitative data – an ethnography of a teacher education program and a set of interviews with teachers that spans career stages – we analyze how teachers make sense of differences in student performance and behavior as they encounter them through their interactions in schools, and how the accumulation of experience with students informs teachers’ understanding of both the sources of these differences and their own capacity to address them. Our findings reveal how teachers draw upon their instructional experiences and other sources of cultural meaning to fill gaps created by the absence of institutionalized accounts for student failure. Teachers tend to fall back on individualistic accounts for explaining differences in student performance consistent with wider cultural ideals of American dream ideology. They begin invoking these meanings in early experiences, and appear to become more wedded to these meanings over time. We conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for understanding the role educational institutions play in legitimizing inequalities in student performance.

Authors

• Judson G. Everitt, Loyola University-Chicago

• Nathalia Hernandez Vidal

• Quintin A Williams, Loyola University-Chicago