Understanding Policy on the Move: The Workings of School Policy and Teachers’ Emergent Positioning Through Narrative

• Main Author: Kerr, Ryan
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Published: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses 01-01-2024
• Subjects: Education; Education philosophy; Education Policy; Educational administration; Educational philosophy; Language
• ISBN: 9798383696477

This study examines the ways that school policies are understood and taken up by teachers. A review of the relevant literature suggests that much school policy, even that which is explicitly designed to ameliorate inequities that exist within schools and school systems, often have an inverse effect. It is also established that teachers, for many reasons, often subvert school policies in their daily practice. Using a transliteracies framework, this study seeks to explore the intimacies of these disconnects for teachers through a close look at their narratives surrounding school policy and the ways that certain policies affect their identities. This study is underpinned by theories of power explicated by Foucault (1980; 1995) and de Certeau (1984) which detail the movement of power across structures and the ways that individuals navigate their understanding of policy through tactical moves. In this research, I ask: How do teachers narrate their understanding of and relationship with school policies?; What do those narratives reveal about power and the way that policy is enacted, received, and/or subverted and the situatedness of those stakeholders?; How do stakeholders in a school system position themselves and their identities when narrating their lived experiences with school policies? Data generated during this research reveals that teachers solidify their epistemological stances on policy through discourse practices while allowing for paradigmatic shifts in their understanding of policies, that linguistically, teachers invoke downscaling moves more dominantly than other scalar moves when describing their lived experiences with school policy, that teachers use a variety of scalar moves in conjunction with one another, sometimes counterintuitively, during their narrations of experiences with school policies, and that teachers’ understanding of school policy often emerges through discursive and semiotic activities, though those teachers in roles of heightened responsibility and perceived power often narrate their policy experiences with stronger stances. Data also suggested that teachers’ understanding of policy is often influenced by multiple, often ineffable influences across space and time and that teacher response to policy is often the result of the omnidirectional flow of power throughout systems in schools and districts. The study contributes to the growing field of policy mobilities, adding the dimension of discourse practices explicitly around teacher identity and school policy. It also contributes to transliteracies theory and methodology (Stornaiuolo et al., 2017) that specifically address power while adding to the corpus of research on student and teacher relationships to school policy.