Teacher's Informal Learning, Identity and Contemporary Education Reform

Abstract

This paper explores links between teachers' learning, the politics and practices of education reform, and teacher identity, examining how teachers learn to negotiate the spaces between promises of improvement, effectiveness, and accountability made in heterogeneous discourses of education reform and their experiences with deteriorating material conditions and social relations of schooling. The paper asserts that learning how to work with or against education reform is a complex process of identity making for teachers, where they encounter and utilize contradictory ideas about good teachers and teaching as well as about children, curriculum, pedagogy, and learning. Researchers designed a small study to examine how Ontario teachers were being positioned and how they understood themselves within the milieu of reform. Twelve teachers completed interviews, commenting on contemporary school reform, particularly issues of curriculum, assessment, and reporting (as well as several other topics). In different ways, all respondents expressed strong disagreement with the provincial government and distrust of their initiatives. However, their teaching and assessment methods showed that they could not avoid reform altogether, and reform shaped their work and identities, even when they strongly disagreed with its goals and methods. Several teachers suggested that democratic and open discussion in their schools was very rare. (Contains 88 references.) (SM) Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document. 1 NALL Working Paper # 56 2002 Teachers' Informal Learning, Identity and Contemporary Education 'Reform' Kari Dehli and Doreen Fumia PERMISSION TO REPRODUCE AND DISSEMINATE THIS MATERIAL HAS BEEN GRANTED BY