Extending the Conversation: English Teachers, Administrators, and Dialogue: Transcending the Asymmetry of Power in the Discourse of Educational Policy

Abstract

In this article, I present six English teachers’ perceptions of the dialogue used by principals and superintendents to communicate policy mandates in their schools. I wanted to learn about the ways in which the discourse employed by these two kinds of policymakers influenced English teachers’ experiences as professionals and how these policies and the language used to convey them influenced the teachers’ autonomy and their instructional decisions. I found that these teachers perceived that policymakers employed an authoritative discourse (Bakhtin 1981, 1986a) that made it difficult for them to engage in dialogue with the policy mandates they received. Bowe, Ball, and Gold (1992) characterized policy as a discourse that functions as “a set of claims about how the world should and might be, a matter of the authoritative allocation of values” (p. 370). I foreground the voices of secondary English teachers to generate dialogue focused on reconceptualizing the nature of policy discourse in U.S. schools.