Polic(y)ing time and curriculum: how teachers critically negotiate restrictive policies

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to theorize teacher agency as enacted through a P/policymaking lens in three elementary classrooms. Big-P Policies are formal, top-down school reform policies legislated, created, implemented and regulated by national, state and local governments. Yet, Big-P policies are not the only policies enacted in literacies classrooms. Rather, little-p policies or teachers’ local, personal and creative enactments of their values and expertise are also in play in daily classroom decisions. Little p-policies are teachers doing their best in response to their students and school contexts. Design/methodology/approach Adapting elements of discursive analysis, this interpretive inquiry is designed to examine textual artifacts, situated alongside classroom events and particular local practices, to explicate what teachers’ policymaking enactments regarding time and curriculum look like across three distinct contexts. Using three elementary classrooms as examples, this paper provides analytic snapshots illustrating teachers’ policymaking to solve problems of practice posed by state and school policies for curriculum, and for use of time at school. Findings The findings suggest that teachers ration (aliz)ed use of time in ways that enacted personal politics, to prioritize children’s personal growth and well-being alongside teachers’ values, even when use of time became “inefficient.” An artifact from three focal classrooms illustrates particular practices – scheduling, connecting and modeling – teachers leveraged to enact little p-policy. Teachers’ little p-policy enactment is teacher agency, used to disrupt temporal and curricular policies. Originality/value This framing is valuable because little-p policymaking works to disrupt and negotiate temporal and curricular mandates imposed on classrooms from the outside.

The language of teacher agency in an eighth grade ELA classroom

“…Mr Royal was both an engaged professional drawing on a dynamic history as a writer and teacher and a manager of standards, accountability structures and administration desires. This study aligns well with Wessel-Powell et al ’s (2019) findings that the classroom becomes a context of its own; whatever the larger landscape of standards and reforms, teachers are ultimately the voice in which students hear what their learning is for. The heteroglossic nature of teacher language though (Bakhtin, 1981/2006) means that teachers’ voices are never always or entirely those of the experienced educator with neither personally persuasive reasons for choosing what they do nor the bureaucrat who knows only company-speak.…”

“…One position is as engaged professionals that leverage their interests, passions and expertise (Lopez, 2011; Bieler, 2013; Keranova, 2016). The second is as managers of reform, standards and assessments (Brass, 2015; Buchanan, 2015; Hungerford-Kresser and Vetter, 2017; Wessel-Powell et al , 2019). In the positions of teachers illuminated by these studies, we see the centripetal influence (Bakhtin, 1981/2006) of educational policy.…”

“…A teacher in Hungerford-Kresser and Vetter’s (2017) study found college and career readiness as articulated in the CCSS to be incomplete in preparing students for future endeavors, so she used other methods not officially tied to the standards-based curriculum to help students learn skills such as collaboration. Wessel-Powell et al (2019) also demonstrated that large-scale policy needs to be worked out locally, such that how it is reiterated often depends on the working of the local teacher; in that translation, the teacher has the opportunity to invite students into the creation of the policy at the local level so that what is actually practiced might align more with the context of the teacher, bringing her professional history and goals for student learning into play in ways that typical views of standardization do not acknowledge.…”

Reading Beyond the Book: Examining a Critical Social Educator’s Race & Equity Read Aloud in an Early Childhood Classroom

“…), Ms. Honey questioned what she could do to support the children in her class. Ms. Honey-as a 30something, white, cisgender, monolingual, USborn woman-opted to deviate from the shared grade-level plans for teaching persuasive writing to tackle more pressing social issues with her students (Wessel-Powell et al, 2019).…”

Writing as a Minecrafter: Exploring how Children Blur Worlds of Play in the Elementary English Language Arts Classroom

“…As described by Dyson (2013), the basics refers to "mastering the ABC's-the sounds emanating from this letter or that one, the ways they are arranged in grammatically 'proper' sentences, and the little punctuation pets that mark their textual territory" (p. 2). The basics typically dominate curriculum selected and regulated by top-down policies, with the intention of creating a more level playing field at school (Wessel-Powell et al, 2019). Policymakers have argued that by foregrounding the basics in literacies, even the most "disadvantaged" of children will gain economic traction in the future.…”