Given the well-documented pervasiveness of high-stakes assessment in preK–12 schools, many researchers have investigated how testing affects students. In this article, Sarah Byrne Bausell and Jocelyn A. Glazier explore the ways that high-stakes testing influences beginning teacher socialization and the ways that teacher colleagues shape one another's responses to these policies. The authors use discourse analysis to examine six years of transcripts collected from a series of quarterly teacher discussion groups, during which elementary school teachers talked about their work within the testing landscape. Their findings indicate that high-stakes testing deeply affects teacher beliefs, practices, and socialization behaviors, thus revealing a troubling tendency to position students as numbers and a sharp decline in talk about teaching philosophies and practices develops alongside the testing policy landscape. Bausell and Glazier recommend that teacher educators prepare future teachers with an understanding of the ways teacher socialization unfolds so that new teachers can be mindful of the factors that may shape their practice.
Purpose
This study aims to understand the supports and challenges to using disciplinary and antiracism lenses when teaching with informational texts in middle grades English Language Arts (ELA) classrooms.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper analyzes teacher talk in four virtual sessions with four middle grades ELA teachers in one school district. Teachers had recently completed a voluntary, school-based antiracism professional development. Researchers used thematic analysis of session transcripts and semi-structured interviews.
Findings
Teachers’ informational text use was nested in and directed by curriculum and contexts that limited disciplinary and antiracist teaching. The context and texts constrained instruction to basic reading skills. Equity was conceptualized as supporting students’ persistence. Discussions of race were avoided.
Research limitations/implications
This study has implications for ELA teacher preparation, and district and state resources to support merging disciplinarity and antiracism in informational text instruction in ELA. The study is limited by the small sample from one district and access to only teacher self-reports.
Originality/value
Secondary ELA disciplinary literacy has privileged literature, yet there is an increase of informational text use in middle grades ELA. Teachers need support teaching informational texts through disciplinary and antiracism lenses.
This article documents collective memories of the founding, curriculum, and attendees of one of the first (1866) Reconstruction Era Quaker-Freedmen School sites in the Southeastern United States. It applies critical oral history methodology including the collection of primary documents, previous investigations into the school, and interviews of community elders. Through the close study of the school’s history, including the present quest for official historical memorialization, this investigation accentuates how Whiteness as property remains across generations and contexts. What began as a historical investigation of the school necessarily evolved as an analysis of the complications in race relations in the observed college town.
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