The professional development school model: unpacking knowledge

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In response to Cochran‐Smith and Lytle's (1998) call for Other ways of researching and thinking about educational research and the recent call by the US Secretary of Education to reform ‘teacher‐training’ programs (Schoicet 2002), this article presents a research study focusing on a reform effort in teacher education. The study moved beyond the ‘findings’ of a critical discourse analysis of the foundational humanist assumptions of the Professional Development School (PDS) model as manifested at a large mid‐west research university. The study uses an analysis of the ‘data/findings’ from Other theoretical perspectives. Using critical discourse analysis of interviews, archival texts and research texts, the contradictions, interruptions and technologies of power emerged. Data from this contested site highlighted multiple discourses concerning social education, educational reform, professionalization, and progress. The results revealed the historical and political discourses that inter and enclose the PDS model, such as reductive gendered notions of the ‘professional’, ‘good teaching’ and the valorization of ‘practice’. This article presents three different ways of analyzing the PDS data: as a psychoanalytic object of desire (Britzman 1998); as a dereferentialized term (Readings 1996); and a floating signifier (Anderson 1998). Thus, it presents ways of rethinking knowledge and power in leadership in education (Lincoln 1998, Popkewitz 1998a, Rapp 2002).