This article focuses on the following questions: 1) How do secondary social studies teachers working in schools of color experience pedagogical negotiations when trying to teach students thoughtful, critically informed citizenship and government and school accountability mandates? and 2) How does teaching with lessons grounded in the principles of authentic intellectual work (AIW) affect this negotiation experience? We employed a phenomenological framework as the methodological basis for eliciting two classroom teachers’ experiences, both of whom have advanced degrees in social studies education and several years of teaching experience in schools of color and of poverty. The findings show that prior to the incorporation of lessons based on the principles of authentic intellectual work, these teachers’ negotiation experiences had strong negatively affective dimensions based on a zero-sum pedagogical conceptualization of curriculum. Following the introduction of lessons based on AIW, these negatively affective dimensions began to recede from their experiences and were replaced by more positive ones. Given that classroom teachers are the ultimate arbiters of curriculum in their classrooms, this research has implications for improving the experiences of secondary social studies teachers working in schools of color.
In the Star Trek universe, the Borg are a race of cybernetic humanoids intent on assimilating all other sentient beings into a collective consciousness through the elimination of difference. Although it would be easy to reduce the Borg Collective to a symbolic cautionary tale for qualitative researchers, we would like to trouble and extend this analysis. For this special edition of Qualitative Inquiry, we adopt Gilles Deleuze's theories of banality and of objective-subjective commensurability to pose challenges to simplicity in methodology and product, and apply these lenses to Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes and film, to our own work as qualitative researchers, and to discussions of how the act of blurring the lines between fiction and philosophy through the trope of science fiction cinema can render complex academic writing more accessible and more enjoyable.
In our current times, educators as a whole—and social studies educators particularly—are facing increased pressures of conservatism and accountability as applied to their curriculum, resulting in excessive test preparation, narrowed curricula, and an inability to prepare students satisfactorily for their lives as adult citizens—factors which are exacerbated in schools of color. While some scholars have proposed the framework for authentic intellectual work (AIW) as a solution to satisfy both accountability pressures and students’ needs beyond schooling while reducing achievement gaps, few have examined classroom teachers with this framework directly. To consider whether the AIW framework stands a chance at successful adoption long term, this study explores several high school world history teachers’ experiences with learning to use authentic intellectual work in a school of color, describes the textures and structures of their experiences through the lens of hermeneutic phenomenology, and makes recommendations for additional research.
As qualitative researchers, we often wrestle with the intricacies of ontological and epistemological frameworks, the complexities of collection and analysis methods, and the difficulties associated with the dissemination cycle. Positing direct challenges to the paradigms underlying the practice of our craft is something we do rather rarely, but it is something we must do nonetheless in order to advance our field in a fundamental fashion. In this article, we argue for an expanded understanding of what constitute data, posit the need to shift away from examining the “found” world exclusively, and assert that researchers not only create their reality, but their data as well. We illustrate our point by presenting our arguments in alternatively rhyming iambic pentameter, which—as poetry is itself intrinsically a creative enterprise—reflexively positions both our text and ourselves as data to be examined, analyzed, and understood.
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