10.4225/03/598be2fe951f6
Bella Nitza Illesca
Bella Nitza
Illesca
Literacy and accountability : the changing shape of English teachers' work
Monash University
2017
English teachers
Literacy programs
Case studies
High school teachers attitudes
2017-08-10 04:37:15
Thesis
https://bridges.monash.edu/articles/thesis/Literacy_and_accountability_the_changing_shape_of_English_teachers_work/5296726
This study uses autobiographical narrative to explore and
interrogate episodes in my professional and personal life that have shaped my
professional identity as an English teacher. I am especially concerned to chart
the contradictions and tensions that I experienced as an English teacher when
implementing two state sponsored middle years literacy programs – Restart
and Access to Excellence – in a government secondary school in Victoria.
I explore the ways in which my beliefs as an English teacher conflicted with my
role as a Literacy Co-ordinator. Although I consciously questioned and resisted
performing certain ideological work, such as administering standardised tests
and sorting students into remedial groups, there was still a sense in which the
narrow, functional model of literacy that underpins such intervention programs
mediated my professional practice, transforming it into something with which I
remained deeply at odds.
<p>[…]</p>
<p>This study can also be read as a critical examination of
recent managerialist reforms in public education in the state of Victoria, and
the ways such reforms mediate the professional identity and practices of
teachers. Schools and teachers find themselves consciously and unconsciously
operating within a ‘performance management’ culture and ‘accountability’
framework that prescribe the skills and knowledge necessary for state school
students to participate in the ‘knowledge economy’. This depoliticised
professional knowledge landscape has resulted in educational reforms that
abstract from and distort the concrete historical and social lives of the
people who inhabit schools. Such reforms not only offer teachers limited
opportunities for genuine professional learning, but constrain the
possibilities for teachers to thinks and enact alternative professional
practices in their classrooms. I argue that any notion of teacher agency and
professional autonomy cannot be abstracted from the network of relationships in
which teachers operate, and that any attempt to explore alternative understandings
of teaching must do more than focus on the knowledge and practices necessary to
improve student ‘outcomes’, but should involve an ideological and ethical
critique of the nature of those ‘outcomes’.</p>