At the Waterfall, Part 1

This post and the next are excerpts from Chapter 5 of my dissertation, a chapter which explores perceptions of race and equity among the teachers. This project is a qualitative/ phenomenological study of teachers at an urban charter school, about how they make shared meanings of the phenomena around them (particularly aspects of contemporary school reform) and make meanings for themselves as teachers in the era of accountability. The first posting in this series is here.

Chapter 5: At the Waterfall, Part 1
 

“It’s always been a discussion at our school” explains Teacher Charlotte, “our school culture in general…everybody’s opinions can be said and heard. And with that a lot of feelings come up and a lot of things come up.” We are sitting at a coffee house around the corner from Pence, and Charlotte is describing her decade at the school and the key structural issue that in her view impacts the culture of Pence the most. “There was a lot of things about race” she continues, "and it was a time I was the only African American teacher period. And when I say period, well, we had like African American [teaching] assistants. We did have a black nurse. We had support staff and like office staff, but as far as classroom teachers there was a year or two where I was the only African American classroom teacher…So there was times when I was like ‘I’m not doing this anymore. I’m going to dental school. I don’t want to do this!’ [Laughs] So this was hard at times. I’d take it home and my mom would say, ‘you can’t leave, like you have to stay there. When you look at the makeup of your students and they need somebody there to start looking up to that looks like them or someone that’s behind a desk that looks like them.’ So I felt like I needed to stay. But I enjoy working at Pence. I mean, with any teaching job it’s always hard, there’s always things, it’s frustrating, and you’re underpaid, but for the most part I don’t hate coming to work every day” (Teacher Charlotte, personal communication, March 27, 2014).

Charlotte has moved from being a fulltime classroom teacher to a Teacher Leader at Pence over those ten years, and she views herself now as a both a teacher and a mentor. Her role is part administrative, part classroom; she teaches part-time (third grade, Fluency Track), trains, observes, and mentors new hires, acts as a liaison between the CEO, Principals, and teachers, and helps define and present relevant professional development sessions for the Pence staff. Race is the most pressing and most pervasive topic in those professional development sessions, and teachers at Pence have been engaged for more than a year in a structured discussion (led in part by outside consultants) on race, privilege, and teaching students with backgrounds different from your own. The aim of this ongoing series of professional development sessions was for teachers to gain “racial proficiency,” meaning they would become more skilled at recognizing how race and racism intersects within Pence culture and in their own teaching practice.

Ella is a co-coordinator of these sessions, and she defines racial proficiency as having to do with awareness, meaning “how aware I am of my own racial identity, how conscious I am of how that…impacts my teaching…how much space I create in my classroom for students of all races and backgrounds to be academically and behaviorally successful” (Teacher Ella, personal communication, October 16, 2014). According to Ella, part of the impetus for this work was the observed disparity (which is just now starting to be analyzed by the administration) in disciplinary action between white students and students of color. More students of color regularly receive negative disciplinary actions at Pence, which the coordinators of the professional development sessions on racial proficiency believed was correlated to the cultural competence and awareness levels of staff and teachers.

Charlotte and I discussed how Pence has approached this problem and where the story of this particular feature of the school began. The invisible (to outsiders) feature of social segregation is, as Charlotte describes it, an outcome of the choices made by the former CEO and the school’s founders about how to approach bilingual education. “I think it started – honestly, the race talks started years ago, again, because I’ve been here, I’ve seen the evolution – started off with the blatant line of division between [Fluency Track] and [Language Instruction Track]” she explains, a division which was present almost since the day Pence opened its doors: “All the rich, white kids [were in Fluency]. And [Language Instruction] was all the black kids of all backgrounds. Like financially it was like you had the blacks who were doing fine, and then there was the ones that were living in shelters. Like it ran the gamut. So then when they started encouraging, because this is how they would present [Fluency to parents], ‘this is immersive, it’s really hard, you have to do a lot outside of school. You have to do this, and this, and this, and this, and then you homework in Spanish…’ Well if I’m a single parent of three kids, and I don’t get home until 7:00 pm, it’s hard enough just doing regular homework. I can’t do that. So it’s really hard for the dynamic of the parents…But then they started to sell it differently, so then you started to see a little bit more of the speckles into both [Fluency and Language Instruction]. So like I remember a couple of years when I started having like more than one or two black students in my class…and that blows my mind, that I remember when it was so blatant”(Teacher Charlotte, personal communication, March 27, 2014).

Charlotte has been actively engaged both in the creation of professional development sessions for teachers on race, and in working with the administration to find ways to alter the two-track system. She is a member of one of several strategic planning task forces the new CEO has formed to review plans for the school’s future expansion. And the message that Pence is “one of the only schools [in the city of Philadelphia] successfully teaching an integrated student population” (as noted in the school’s new racial equity task force mission statement, shared with me by Ella) is a prominent school feature, a prominent aspect of Pence’s current marketing approach, and part of their argument for expansion. But as Hannah explained to me, students in the Language Instruction Track have always been viewed through a “deficit model” by Pence teachers.

Compounding this is the evident social division of students who “have been in the same grade for five years…and don’t even know each others’ names” because their academic lives have been so separated by the two-track approach (Teacher Hannah, personal communication, March 21, 2014). Charlotte reiterated that in her view everyone is missing out if students (and teachers) are starkly segregated by track. “I just remember a crucial time when it was like we had to figure out how to make it stop feeling like ‘us and them’ or ‘them and us, and them’” Charlotte says, “so discussions happened, ‘how do you all think as teachers we can start to blend in the two, [Fluency and Language Instruction] and that’s when the [blended art and dance classes in the lower school] started.” And making this core change in Pence’s organization after years in operation has meant that the administration and teachers have had to face the impact of that division, and the language used around and about race:”[T]here were teachers – it was beyond the students. It was the culture of the teachers also, and the teacher in the middle of this conversation said ‘well it’s just, my students are afraid, because a lot of the [Language Instruction] students are aggressive and loud, and my students are scared of them.’ And that was my deciding moment of, ‘wow, it’s beyond the parents.’ They always say it’s the parents, the parents, the parents. And it was like that moment, and someone called them out on that, and said ‘do you realize what you just said about them, they’re scary, them?’ It turned into ‘a group of students are scary.’ And so that’s, that’s when the conversation I feel like really was like administration was really like, ‘okay, we need to figure this out.’ I don’t think they were fully equipped on how to deal with it”(Teacher Charlotte, personal communication, March 27, 2014).

Charlotte describes her understanding of the purposes of teaching succinctly: “No student doesn’t want to learn. It’s my job to figure out how to make them want to show that they want to learn…Every child wants to feel good about themselves and their learning.” But like many other Pence teachers, she is continually in a position of responding – in interpersonal interactions and with her own inner dialogue – to Pence’s organizational ethics: “It’s a scary thing to have to do self-reflection on [race]…but I can honestly say to this day even it’s still an issue. It’s beyond just having a culture disconnect with the non-white teachers with the African American students. But it’s also me, as an African American teacher, with my non-African American students…It’s still a culture disconnect, and it’s a different thing, people are just different, culturally. But it’s not a bad thing, but it’s like I recognize it, and that’s the only way I can admit it and say it out loud and fix it. But if you’re not going to admit and say it out loud that’s where the problems are lingering, like ‘It’s not me. It’s not me. No, no, no, I love all my students. I don’t see color.’ Those comments are coming up [in professional development sessions]. So that is very frustrating"(Teacher Charlotte, personal communication, March 27, 2014).

For Charlotte, the story of Pence’s issues with “racial proficiency” comes into play as she makes meaning of her professional self in the context of the school. As Perinbanayagam (2000) notes, “class, race, caste, and gender, etc. are inescapably meanings derived from various discourses and assembled variously…and richly articulated in the mind and memories of the self” (p. 46). In Charlotte’s case, the social/structural element of race interplays with organizational responses and language use at Pence in which she, as an employee, is continually immersed. The actions Charlotte takes are informed by her own history, memory, and experience, and these shape her professional identity in this context. She had a hand in planning the August 2014 induction for new teachers, where one of the topics covered is how to build a racially proficient community at Pence. And during the summer of she also helped to create the mission and structure of the new Racial Equity Task Force. One stated mission of this task force is to increase racial proficiency among staff and faculty, with the goal of achieving racial equity in students’ behavioral outcomes.

Teacher Ann has been at Pence (on and off) for ten years total, first as a long-term substitute for all grades, then as a teaching assistant, and now as a 6-8 grade classroom teacher. Her subject is Spanish and she teaches students in the Lower Track. She sees her role as helping her students “make connections between themselves and others, make connections between their culture and others while also learning the language.” We talked about the culture of Pence, the history of the two-track system, and her perspective on that as a teacher and as an African American woman. She explained that for her there is a problematic intersection between the ethics of teaching and the culture of open discussion around race that the school is attempting to promote. In her view, the biggest ethical issue is teacher/student confidentiality, because “I think , teachers just talk or just feel like you need to share and we don’t always think about whether it’s appropriate to share, even with a colleague” (Teacher Ann, personal communication, March 17, 2014).

Pence uses a community-focused responsive teaching approach. This “responsive classroom curriculum” was developed by the non-profit Northeast Foundation for Children and this teaching model is implemented at Pence in grades K-4. The model promotes respectful interpersonal interactions and the fostering of students’ emotion management. Proponents of this model strive to reiterate positivity across the school culture in order to build and sustain a stable school-wide community. This is reiterated in Pence’s middle school grades by another approach, the Developmental Designs curriculum, which also forefronts social-emotional skills building and adherence to classroom and school rules and cultural norms.

Ann strives to integrate Developmental Designs concepts into her own teaching practice, specifically encouraging students to be self-aware and that when they encounter an issue they should “work it out themselves…that’s what it’s all about. So they’re evaluating, they’re analyzing, they’re discussing, they’re being empathetic, they’re putting themselves in the place of someone else, they’re collaborating…to expose students to expressing their ideas without being really judgmental” (Teacher Ann, personal communication, March 17, 2014). As for the teachers, Ann’s view is that the ongoing push to get staff to engage in this same kind of critical thinking and self-expression around the issue of race through the directed professional development sessions is linked to a perception about teacher-student relationships: "I think [the Pence administration] started [the professional development sessions on race] because teachers were requesting it...I think that teachers said 'we need someone to come in, like we need some outside to come in...to give us some guidance and some thought questions, facilitate some discussions.' So like how useful its been, I don't know. I think the teachers were complaining to the administration that we need to talk about things. And to relate better to the students"(Teachers Ann, personal communication, March 17, 2014).

But this effort is constrained, in Ann’s opinion, by two organizational realities, two long-term tensions, within the Pence culture. These tensions impact how and how much teachers at Pence talk about and share understandings on a range of issues, including race. The first is the exclusion that teachers who only work with one track experience and how this exclusion shapes perspectives on students, parents, and other teachers. That exclusion also shapes Ann’s view of Pence community values and how she talks about her work at a school with a two-track curriculum. She explains that “I’m one of only two teachers [who teach 6-8 grade students] who never works with the [Fluency Track] students…So because it’s a different dynamic between the two programs, between the students and the [Fluency] and the students in the [Language Instruction] program, it’s different because I never see the [Fluency] students. So the only reason I know most of them now is because I’ve been at Pence so long, so I’ve had them all when I was a sub. I remember when they were in second grade. But four years from now I won’t know the [Fluency] students, because I never worked with them…So like it’s very different – there’s different parental involvement, there’s different part of knowledge the kids are coming in with, like different backgrounds amongst the students in the two programs”(Teacher Ann, personal communication, March 17, 2014).

As sociologists Brubaker and Cooper (2000) note, this kind of reification is a social process and “it is central to the process of ‘ethnicity,’ ‘race,’ ‘nation,’ and other putative identities” which can “crystallize, at certain moments, as a powerful, compelling reality” (Brubaker, p. 5). This socio-organizational reality of Pence impacts the story of Ann’s past, present, and future, and thus her story of the school culture as well. And her perspective on the two-track system was shared by the majority of the teachers I spoke with.

The second organizational issue Ann describes, and which in her view directly impacts her role and experience at the school, is that Pence was founded on another form of exclusion. “I think that the founders of the school were upper middle class,” she explains, “and like, a lot of the first families were upper middle class, that they weren’t as concerned about salary, because they had comfortable salaries,” she tells me and “I feel that for them it wasn’t as much as a priority as making sure that they had like this dual-language program, and, you know, they had the global citizen curriculum. I think for them, well, you know, yeah, their teachers when they started, making $36,000 or $38,000, like that’s okay, because like ‘the school is awesome’…I’ve had several conversations with teachers here who have had to borrow money from their parents or move in with their parents. Or one teacher who was eating peanut butter sandwiches and apples every day, because that was, like, her protein. She couldn’t afford to buy meat. So she would eat lentils and make a dish or something out of the lentils. That’s crazy…As a Pence teacher, we just don’t get paid enough…[it’s] one of the main factors with our turnover, more than anything else” (Teacher Ann, personal communication, March 17, 2014).

This concern was also expressed by several of the other Pence teachers I spoke with. Ann explained to me that she persists at Pence despite these issues by thinking about, speaking about, and acting on solutions. She has acted on the pressing issue of compensation by becoming a member of a newly formed teacher task force on teacher pay and turnover, which the new CEO just agreed to meet with on a regular basis.

As Akkerman and Meijer (2010) noted in their research of teacher identity development, teachers continually engage in processes (external and internal, active and reflective) and through these find their own identity positions. This activity results in the acquisition of insights and information that in turn help form professional identity. Ann’s action on an issue that matters to her is evidence of this, and gives her a sense of empowerment because being on the compensation task force gives her an opportunity to speak to the CEO. But unlike their colleagues in traditional public schools, teachers in charter schools generally have no group affiliation (like a union) or broader educational bureaucracy in place that frames the basic ethics of education, supports the development of their professional identities simply as educators, or provides protection for them when they take action. And any actions do they take are done at the risk of unemployment.

Pence teachers are positioned, as are all teachers in charters, to have to negotiate around (or navigate priorities based on) business ethics, organizational processes, and policies and practices for which they have no training and about which they have no leverage. Ann explained that on policy issues, Pence teachers generally lack both voice and choice, which was yet another point she raised that was echoed by many other Pence teachers. Regarding the decision the CEO and Board eventually made to shorten spring break and to add President’s Day as a work day (due to the winter weather closures), for example, Ann asked “Did we have a choice? No, there was no discussion about it…some decisions we know do come from the Board, or from the admin, so we’re told there isn’t really room for discussion, so it’s like teachers, we might feel like we didn’t have a choice. Why didn’t we vote? Why couldn’t we extend a day in June? The choice was made for us” (Teacher Ann, personal communication, March 17, 2014).

In a similar vein, regarding compensation at Pence, Ann describes that the pay scales and incremental increases for teachers and counselors is a matter of public record, while the pay scale for administrators is not. “I have no idea how they [the administration at Pence] figure base pay,” she tells me, “it could be a like a handshake in a backroom.” As Ann’s experiences with the compensation task force and around the professional development sessions on race convey, Pence teachers push for equity from below (for themselves and for students) and are continually made responsible, as employees, for changing on behalf of the organization.

From Teacher Kevin’s perspective, Pence’s ongoing professional development on race, led by “a couple of professors from [a local university] who are allegedly experts, it’s okay. I mean, I think we, in some ways, some of us are resentful about it. Why focus on race when there’s so many other things that you need to have conversations about” (Teacher Kevin, personal communication, March 10, 2014). Kevin came to teaching after a long career outside of education and has been at the school for eleven years. His self-definition is “teacher/coach/dad” and he sees that his role at Pence changes depending on who is looking. “I teach math, but my job is way bigger than that” he explains, “My job is to try to teach them how to be responsible, mature young adults…helping prepare them for the world…I think [my role] is defined by different people differently. I’m a math teacher. I hope and I think that I’m a molder of young adults. I think that’s how I see myself, and I think generally that’s probably how other people see me, and hopefully that’s how people see most of us here” (Teacher Kevin, personal communication, March 10, 2014).

Regarding his pedagogical practices at Pence versus other schools (he taught previously at what he called “hellholes in North Philly”), Kevin tells me “I can’t imagine that I would be any different in no matter what setting I was in. You go in and you teach [students] things that you think are important, some of them are aligned to the standards, some of them are aligned to your personal philosophy of life” (Teacher Kevin, personal communication, March 10, 2014). And regarding the impact of the ongoing professional development sessions on race, Kevin notes the psychological and emotional aspects of the process, and its limitations. "I guess some of the conversations that have come up" in the sessions on race "are interesting because, some of the things [the session facilitators] say to me, its like 'that's ridiculously obvious. Why does that even need to be mentioned?' But then other folks from different backgrounds, and didn't understand the impact race has on African Americans in particular. They grew up in white, suburban neighborhoods and barely knew any African Americans their whole lives" he explains. "So I think given that experience it's pretty impossible to know how an African American feels day in and day out, dealing with the things they have to deal with. I mean, we had, during one of those sessions, we had a circle, and everybody had to share about something, and when it got to be my turn I kind of broke down talking about my life. I had a pretty tough childhood. And I grew up in the projects, and I could go on forever, but I was poor...but ultimately not black, so I can't know what it feels to be black" (Teacher Kevin, personal communication, March 10, 2014).

For Kevin, teaching is not a process of self-discovery.“When I started working here” he explains, “I was already who I am…you know, hopefully we all evolve, but I don’t think my social or political views have changed much in the last 30 years” he tells me. He did not (and Pence administration would not have allowed him to) sit out the professional development sessions on race, for example, and he explored his own memories and experiences while taking part in those sessions. That he makes sense of that engaged narrative process through an individualist, slightly detached, stable/static lens is an aspect of his professional identity (teacher/coach/dad) as well. This is one example of how “signs of identity, with their logical structures” are “put into practice in everyday life to organize the world in which an individual has to live. The signs become elements of the acts, the meaning and significance of which may change as they proceed…to claim an identity by an act is also to claim a place in an evolving narrative”(Perinbanayagam, p. 105).

Although he tells me that his identity is fully formed, Kevin is, like all the other teachers at Pence, part of an evolving story within the school about race and how teachers must become more skilled at identifying racism and its impacts. The organizational narrative about how to address these impacts places the resolution squarely on the shoulders of teachers, each of whom is required, as employees, to engage in a personal reflective process about what is actually a structural issue.

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Invisible features: hidden aspects of teacher identity in an urban charter school by Martha Hope Carey is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Taking on the Color of Our Surroundings, Part 3

Continuing with the process I started on May 22…this is the final excerpt from Chapter 4 (on the visual culture inside the Philadelphia K-8 charter school. This project is a qualitative/ phenomenological study of teachers at an urban charter school, about how they make shared meanings of the phenomena around them (particularly aspects of contemporary school reform) and make meanings for themselves as teachers in the era of accountability. The first posting in this series is here.

Chapter 4: Taking on the color of our surroundings, part 3

Soreide (2007) has found through her research on teacher identity constructions that the development of visual culture within classrooms, with content generated and chosen by teachers, is a way of using narrative resources to construct autonomous, contextual identities. Creating and posting visual culture content is both a process and an act, a presentation of signs that reflect both the inner dialogues that teachers have with themselves and the dialogues teachers are engaged in within the culture of Pence. It is a way of expressing intersubjectivity and also individuality. Perinbanayagam (2000) puts this same idea in another light: “The self, it turns out, is not elusive nor is it mysterious” he writes, “rather the self is manifest in the acts, the individuated product of a mind, that the actors and others recognize and classify as the issue of an embodied identity…The self is not a static thought-way but a recursive sign or system of signs” (Perinbanayagam, p. 45).

Like every school, Pence as an organization provides teachers, students, visitors, and parents alike with signs and systems of signs that signify the organization’s “self,” the meanings of which can be interpreted broadly – in part because Pence is not a franchise of a larger chain of charter schools. Pence has not sold itself as a place that promotes the very visible feature of global citizenship and which also has, for the teachers, an invisible feature of implied autonomy, because the interpretation of meaning about visual content in the classroom and its relevance to teaching is perceived to be up the individual educator.

In interviews with Pence teachers this carried over into perceptions of independence about teaching practices, and how such practices impact students. As Teacher Sam (who has been teaching students with special needs for seven years, and working at Pence for the last two) described this, “I think that that is what people predominately see around here…they just kind of feel inspired by teachers who kind of decide what it is that they’re going to do with their classroom, and how they’re going to organize data, how it is that they’re going to teach their class…You go into a lot of different rooms, and you see that teachers have many different styles. It’s not that everyone’s doing the same objective. I do, we do, you do…And I think it’s great, because the kids get a pretty well-rounded education”(Teacher Sam, personal communication, March 12, 2014).

Teacher Karen taught at a charter school for four years before she came to Pence in 2013, and that school was operated by one of the key charter management organizations contracted to run multiple school sites in Philadelphia. Her experience there was of constraint. At Pence, she explains, it is of autonomy. “The central office [at her former charter school] micromanages the teachers, and the teachers are supposed to micromanage the children. So that didn’t give me a lot of room to try to grow as a professional and explore the things I wanted to explore and do the things that I knew create those rich, authentic learnings experiences. I definitely, within my building and with my colleagues, found some opportunities to do that, but was never really able to really meet my professional goals, because they’re just really rigid…Here you have autonomy and with that you have independence. And there’s absolutely collaboration, and there’s absolutely support, and there’s absolutely camaraderie…it’s a little more relational here…you as an educator need to build your relationships and find your collaborators where they’re going to resonate with you, and where you think they’ll be beneficial, and where you put the effort” (Teacher Karen, personal communication, April 10, 2014).

What became evident from my interviews and observations of teachers at Pence was best summarized by Karen: teachers at this school build, find, create, and engage in ways that help them to sustain themselves, because the school culture conveys to them that they have the autonomy to do so. The posters in the hallways and the school guidelines in classrooms serve a function but teachers did not describe feeling constrained by these signs and systems of signs. As Teacher Lisa (who is in her first year teaching English Language Arts to middle school grades at Pence) explained to me, “[The] school guidelines [poster] needs to be in your classroom. So there are some things…like, ‘every classroom needs to have those to continue to build as a community.’ And that thing? I never look…That means nothing to me”(Teacher Lisa, personal communication, April 29, 2014).

Embedded in this response is an aspect of professional self-identity. As Perinbanayagam notes, acts that help to define identity are individuated but also shared, and the meanings of acts are shared. The culture of Pence is one where teachers’ actions about visual culture, and choices about how and whether to engage with it, are enactments of not just their professional identities but also a reiteration of one of those features that seemingly differentiates Pence from other urban charters: teachers’ sense of autonomy. This is the shared perception about which Pence teachers express pride. But the perception of autonomy, or at minimum the ability to distance oneself from some of the ever-present signs and systems of signs in Pence’s visual culture by sarcastically referring to them (as Leah did) as “global citizenship proverbs,” is not actually professional autonomy or freedom. Just as the perception of empowerment or independence within the classroom is not the same as organizationally-sanctioned teacher empowerment/self-governance.

One very overt example of this distinction is a story Leah shared with me about how the Pence administration responded to missing their AYP goal last year. “[T]here was a genuine concern. And the administration addressed that concern by moving towards something that I definitely disagreed with, which was every six weeks we did testing. And we were supposed to write these tests and then use the data to analyze what the kids needed. I mean, there was best practices involved in it, and I could see the good in it, but I have a hard time figuring out how to discretely test English Language Arts concepts anyway on a multiple choice test. I see it as an art, and so it was kind of making me crazy. And I felt like every six weeks we couldn’t get the – the administration helped a lot that they got a Scantron machine, and they gave us time outside of class to write the tests or put the tests together. But all of that time I would’ve been rather creating the next project the kids could work on. And so it did feel like it took time that I would rather have been doing something else. And I didn’t see that it was helping the kids all that much”(Teacher Leah, personal communication, March 31, 2014).

By the end of the year, the administration relented and the testing pressure eased. Leah perceived this as a win; “to me, the administration tried something, it didn’t work, we all talked about it, and we changed” (Teacher Leah, personal communication, March 31, 2014). The teachers also suggested that the school integrate after-school tutoring into their early dismissal Wednesdays, then developed the structure to provide this tutoring and worked it into their own schedules for the 2013-14 school year. In Leah’s description of this experience, the administration of Pence was responding to teachers’ voices. Teachers did not feel the supplemental testing was useful or effective, and asked to change the newly implemented policy. The change that occurred was teacher-driven, and Leah conveyed a feeling of pride about that in her discussion with me. But the need for change was predicated on an organizational decision that did not include teacher voices at the outset, which reflects an organizational ethic.

That the Pence teachers saw copious testing as disruptive and ineffective and it took a full school year for the administration to concur (or to gather enough data on test scores to find the policy ineffectual) reflects the reality that their perspectives on the policy’s effectiveness were not considered when the policy was being developed. The teachers’ response to being forced to implement the policy was to find a way to meet the needs of students with minimal disruption in the classroom, but which disrupted teachers’ schedules, an action which reflects the teachers’ view of their ethical obligation to students. The Pence administration did not find the ideal solution to AYP panic, but Pence teachers did, and in the process developed the structure for an ongoing tutoring program that serves those students most in need of support. The solution has so far been effective. But Pence teachers were not empowered agents through this process, because the choice was made for teachers by the administration about the organization’s response to missing the AYP for the first time. That choice amplified a problem, and the solution to that problem then had to be developed by the teachers.

Feeling autonomous and empowered at Pence, as Karen and others explained, means to act on one’s own to make connections that are professionally sustaining, or to post messages in one’s own classroom that are self-sustaining, or to feel free to be creative with how you implement the required curriculum. The fact that Lisa can and does ignore the signs in her classroom, and Tina posts them too high for any student in or visitors to her classroom to even see – these are individual acts in individuated spaces within the school culture. But this does not mean teachers can autonomously self-govern, or have a seat at the table when policies that directly impact the business are devised and implemented.

For much of its existence, Pence was led by one CEO, who was also one of the school’s founders. Her vision for the school’s identity is conveyed in the school guideline statements in each classroom, the listings of acceptable behavior posted in the stairwells and hallways, and in the ubiquitous posters on what it means to be a member of the Pence community. The legacy of her vision is what every teacher is responding to, both in terms of visual culture content, in terms of how the school administration forms policies and makes decisions, and in the school’s curricular focus. The former CEO and the founding parents sought to promote global citizenship as a school theme and supported this theme with a firm commitment to the idea that all students would be taught a second language, ideally with an immersive approach. But like Leah’s AYP example above, this commitment did not involve teacher voice at the outset. And the implementation of this idea has had a fundamentally disruptive effect (explored more in Chapter 5) on teachers and students alike, and which Pence teachers are now being tasked with changing.

Pence (as a workplace) clearly promotes the idea that the teachers who take on the responsibility for changing some aspect of the school culture should perceive it as personally empowering, and as a reflection of their autonomy, which is something many teachers who have worked at other charters have never experienced. Because this is a charter, however, the teachers in this organization are tasked with finding solutions that both align with Pence’s business ethics and are reflective of thinking about future growth strategies predicated on product differentiation in an ever-growing urban market. And this is a job they have not been trained for. As educators they have instead been trained to attend to the tangible needs of any and all students, and to engage in the most effective pedagogical practices to meet those needs, in the here and now.

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Invisible features: hidden aspects of teacher identity in an urban charter school by Martha Hope Carey is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Taking on the Color of Our Surroundings, Part 2

Continuing with the process I started on May 22, the next few posts are from Chapter 4 of my dissertation. This project is a qualitative/ phenomenological study of teachers at an urban charter school, about how they make shared meanings of the phenomena around them (particularly aspects of contemporary school reform) and make meanings for themselves as teachers in the era of accountability. The first posting in this series is here.

Chapter 4: Taking on the color of our surroundings, part 2

My starting point for the research was an analysis of the visual culture of Pence, which incorporates how Pence presents itself as an entity and which, when found in classrooms, can also reflect teachers’ individual expressions of their professional selves. Visual culture critic Paul Duncum explains that visual culture is a generalized term for postmodern everyday aesthetics, what we encounter visually in schools, stores, “city streetscapes, and tourist attractions as well as mass media images” along with images streamed to us over the internet – all of which are now part of ordinary daily life, and part of the daily life of a school (Duncum 1999, p.296).

Duncum describes the comprehension of such visual contexts as a psychological counterweight, and a balancing of self-identity, against the “aestheticization of everyday life [which] involves…how we all construct our appearance for ourselves and for others” (Duncum 2007, p.288). The function of visual culture is to transmit values and beliefs, and to do so in an unconscious manner; “[i]deology works because it is unconscious,” Duncum notes, “it operates behind our backs. Hegemony…works its way through ordinary social exchanges [and] establishes the parameters for thinking and feeling outside of which it is not possible to think or feel or act alone” (Duncum 1999, p.299). And as educator Patricia Amburgy describes this, with respect to the interpretation of visual culture, “viewers may actively and critically interpret what they see but viewers may also passively accept dominant constructed meanings” (Amburgy 2011, p.6). And in her work, Lipman suggests that the educator, particularly in contemporary urban education, must ask whom this passivity benefits.

Signs, lists, and messages for a range of audiences are on almost every wall at Pence. The school’s visual culture content reiterates ideas about and the ideals of the school in a pervasive and direct manner, primarily with text. Each classroom and hallway contains bilingual postings of the school mission statement along with a list of directives for expected student behavior at the beginning of each class (called the “First Five Minutes” list). There are also additional posters, in two languages, directing students to follow three key rules when in hallways and on stairwells, and other posters identifying the five aspects of being a Pence citizen, which include “using Pence actions” and “being a team player” and “making everyone feel welcome.”

On the staff room bulletin board, several lists are tacked up including one outlining the acceptable student behaviors at recess (students are to stay away from cars, slide one at a time on the recess yard slide, no playing tag on the mulched areas). Other notices remind teachers of the school’s maternity leave policy, announce job openings and teacher awards, list when students should or should not see the school nurse, and detail the appropriate responses to bullying behavior or anti-LGBT language used by students. Also posted in the staff room, and above the lockers in several hallways, are glossy laminated signs that list what one teacher laughingly referred to as the “global citizenship proverbs” – Pence’s version of employee workplace motivational posters that have questions for teachers to ponder, such as “Did you know that when you make students responsible for their belongings you are nurturing global citizenship?”

Along the main hallway on the ground floor, near the front door to the school, there is a large wall space used as a display area for projects that promote the culture of Pence. For one week in March the wall was covered with notices about acts of kindness which students in all grades had engaged in; each act was printed onto award which was then posted. The awards listed “Lining up for recess quietly so that other classes could focus” and “Deciding to read a book while his classmates watch a movie he could not watch due to family beliefs” as examples of acts of kindness. A small poster on construction paper, with words in magic marker written by a second grader, was also attached to the wall next to the awards. It read “Don’t act up. Help out.”

From April through June this same wall was gradually covered with a growing number of black and white copied photos of K-3 graders. Each photo was of an individual student holding up a card that stated what they wanted to be when they grew up. Their aspirations ranged from artist to soccer star to doctor to biologist to judge to police officer to President. One happily grinning student wanted to be a “ninja y maestro.” The display was in the most visible area of the school, near the front door and right next to the main office, right down the hall from the cafeteria, where everyone – all Pence students, teachers, staff, parents, visitors – could see. The concept and placement seemed a heartfelt reflection of school pride. But the images were also visually evocative of something else: each image contained just the head and shoulders of a child, facing the camera, each one holding an 8 x 10 card with writing on it, directly in front of their chest, much like mug shots.

On the wall across from the display area is a permanent mural, created years ago by Pence students and still bursting with color, which states in Spanish that the school is all about global citizenship. Next to this mural are the emblems from the Pennsylvania Department of Education that certify Pence has achieved AYP in consecutive years. And near those emblems are notifications of awards to the school, including a plaque from a prominent international investment bank’s foundation, given to Pence in 2008 for its focus on promoting global cultural awareness. There are also wall-sized maps by the stairwell on each floor of the school.

Pence has no art program in grades 6-8, and only one period of art class per student per week for students in grades K-5, so older students’ classroom projects (on geography, literature, math) make up much of the school’s artwork. Multiple map projects, designed by students, line the hallway near the 7th and 8th grade classrooms, including one outlining how resources and populations are dispersed around the globe. The question “How do maps affect your thoughts about the world?” is printed on white paper and posted near a cluster of these resources maps. I found myself re-reading that almost every day that I was at Pence. This was one of the few questions I saw posted in a public area of the school that did not refer to actions and behaviors, but rather to critical thinking and intellectual engagement.

Listings of the “right” behaviors, school guidelines, “proverbs” about citizenship, posters on human rights and global religions, Pence’s achievements on State tests, the images and statements presented on the display wall, and status recognition from an investment bank and student- work-as-art all intermingle in the space inside Pence, and teachers are saturated by this all, every day.

As part of her research, Lipman examined the focus on testing in school reform policies in Chicago and how this pacified both pedagogy and the actual language of teaching and learning. “As accountability measures exert real authority over student, teachers, and school administrators and permeate instruction,” she found, content and context become dis-embedded; a “staff development session on ‘critical thinking skills’…was about teaching children how to think about test questions…[an] example of ‘making students part of the educational process’ was students making up their own multiple choice test questions” like those on a State test (Lipman 2004, p.80). These examples reveal acquiescence to the accountability mindset that can permeate educational settings. But this type of acquiescence is not limited to how textual information is formally structured or delivered within the classroom.

The aspects of visual culture that Duncum critiques are typically dis-embedded symbols, but they can also include physical environments, and images of those environments. An example of this is photographer Richard Ross’ Architecture of Authority, a collection of images of specific public places that were designed for constraint: jails, the lobby of a Secret Service office, border crossings. But the book opens with a photograph of the Montessori circle at his children’s school, a reminder “that coercion starts young and wears many disguises…The legendary open-classroom approach of the Montessori method is curiously contradicted by the big white circle on the floor…Does the circle have to be literally drawn to make the point about fitting into a system?” (Ross 2007, p.10) Lipman addresses this idea as well, by noting how urban spaces in our globalized society often become both a visual fetish and an element of social control, explaining that as “global economic processes make gentrification ‘the cutting edge of urban change’…education policies become a material force supporting the displacement of working-class and low-income communities, the transformation of others into urban ethnic theme parks, and the consolidation of the city as a space of corporate culture” (Lipman, p.179).

Pence is part of that corporate culture space in marginal ways, via small visual reminders, such as the colorful sign attached to its entrance gates listing the corporate sponsors who helped to pay for and build the school’s playground. But in terms of the organization as a whole, the school has never been part of a charter management organization, is situated in an extant 100-year-old public school building (as opposed to an office building), and was founded by a group of community parents (not an outside organization or business group). The examples of the visual culture in the wide Pence hallways capture the visible features the school wishes to promote. They also echo aspects of the more subtle, sometimes invisible features of the school that can impact teachers’ professional identities.

Since Pence is not part a chain of urban charter schools, it does not have on display consistent, pre-packaged marketing messages framed by a larger corporate entity. But Pence does use its visual culture to present the ethics of the organization – both the educational ethics, represented by the school’s curricular focus and policies, and also Pence’s business ethics, as represented by those organizational structures, actions, and messages to employees that promote adherence to actions and values that best ensure this school’s longevity. When asked about the case for charters in Philadelphia from a business ethics standpoint, a former member of the School Reform Commission explained to me that the best case is when charters are viewed as “a repair and recovery strategy” for the city, “a response to a crisis” and a means of finding best practices to implement in traditional schools, rather than as a long-term or stand-alone solution (J. Dworetzky, personal communication, February 7, 2014). Pence does not present as a temporary solution, a test case, a laboratory for best practices, or a means to recovery for the School District of Philadelphia; it presents as a stand-alone solution.

You come to know about how Pence views discipline and self-discipline (of teachers and of students), expectations of interpersonal relations within the space, and the value it places on the cultural capital of global citizenship when you read what is posted on the hallway walls. But alongside the school mission statements, guidelines posters, and examples of student work, the school’s classrooms also contain teacher-generated visual discourses. Such in-classroom examples of visual culture express to others something about that teacher’s sense of values and purpose. But these also reiterate to that teacher who they are as professionals within the school culture, and how they make meaning of themselves within this setting.

In Teacher Rob’s 7th grade social studies classroom, for example, he shares a personal creed on posters in the front of the classroom, written in both English and Spanish: “I believe that you are all capable of doing great things. I believe everyone is smart in his or her own way, and we all deserve respect. I believe that hard works leads to success. I believe there are no shortcuts on the road to success. I believe we were all meant to love and be loved. Life is hard, and I believe true success lies in making this world an easier place to live in.”

Rob, who is in his third year teaching at Pence after teaching at another charter for one year, describes his professional identity as an educator rather than as a teacher. “I mean, for me, when I think of a teacher I think of someone specifically in a classroom that is up in front of the room talking to people” he explains, “and when I think of ‘educator,’ I think of it being a little bit more well-rounded, and that it addresses more elements of the students and their lives. So not just, you know, their academic growth, but also social emotional, you know, their self-confidence, their self-image, and I feel like that…that’s probably for me the more important part of my job…if they leave and feeling good about themselves and having a positive self-imagine, and believing that they’re smart, and believing that they’re capable, and interacting with their peers, and believing that their voice is worth hearing then those are the things that are really important to me…and I think that the academic learning comes as a result of the other things that we do, making kids feel comfortable, making them feel like they’re listened to, that kind of thing”(Teacher Rob, personal communication, May 6,2014).

Rob’s choice of visual content, so prominently displayed at the front of the room, aligns with both his self-description and with his view of the values of Pence. Like every other teacher in the building, he must teach to the standards, but he sees his key role as an educator as aiding in the development of emotional maturity and confidence in his students.

I observed Teacher Ella, who has been at Pence for four years, discussing (in Spanish and English) constitutional amendments and what an ACLU “bust card” is with her 8th grade social studies class. On one of her classroom walls was a large poster with a quote from the writer David Foster Wallace: “The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able to truly care about other people, and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.” Ella says she teaches best through connecting content to students’ experiences and by encouraging their participation, rather than through direct instruction. She views herself “first and foremost as a teacher” and explains that “[t]he longer I’m in the position the more I…think about teaching as encompassing…relationships with my students and less about what specifically I teach them. So I’d say that [my role] is ‘in progress,’ or that it’s like ‘in motion.’”

Ella also believes that “the kids have to really care about what I’m trying to get them to learn. And if there’s no reason for them to care then there’s no reason for them to learn it, and there’s no reason for me to be teaching it…So I would say that’s key, like [content] has to really be directly meaningful. They have to want to know about it. So relevance is huge for me. And I would say the other thing, although I struggle with it…is like them being able to have a community of learning with each other. So the idea that they want to ask each other questions and help each other find the answers. And they want to work together and tackle something together…I want very much to have a classroom where like, you know, when someone has a question they don’t just ask me. They’re asking each other, and they want to help each other, and they want to learn together, and they want to figure out what things mean, and like tackle issues together. So that’s a big part of like my dream of how teaching and learning works”(Teacher Ella, personal communication, April 20, 2014). Teacher Nia is in her first year at Pence, and she self-describes as both an educator and an advocate. She says her primary responsibility is “to educate my children to be successful in the world that they live in…but also to be able to advocate for them and with them or at least teach them the ability to advocate for themselves when necessary.” For her this approach to pedagogy aligns with her philosophy about the profession: “I’ve always been told that a teacher can never be ordinary, because if a teacher is ordinary that means your students are ordinary. And the purpose of teaching is to help mold the minds of these young children who will then go onto shape the world. So as a result you’re responsible as a teacher is to shape the future…I truly think that my role as an educator is to help these children develop into good and progressive human beings…When I first started teaching I wanted to give them the skills they need to be successful in life. And now I have learned to differentiate between the two. That being progressive includes the skills that you need to be successful in life, but that it can’t be limited to that…to be a progressive human being you have to have the skills to hold down a good job. You have to have the skills to be able communicate with your peers. You have to have the skills to be able to navigate the information that you’re getting. So it’s a part of it. But the big picture here is to help them become progressive human beings”(Teacher Nia, personal communication, March 26, 2014).

Nia attributes part of her understanding of the purposes and meanings of teaching to the Moral Sciences classes she attended as a child in school in India, classes which stressed both religious and secular moral actions (be polite, be respectful of elders, obey your parents, be truthful). This is similar to what U.S. educators call character education, which emphasizes, among other things, student docility, dependence on adult approval, respect for authority, and the acceptance of hierarchical structures of power as natural (Halstead 2010, p. 305).

At the charter school where she taught previously (before moving to Pennsylvania), they had a specific curricular focus on character education, which Nia describes as particularly relevant when teaching a population where many students are “from a divided household where parents are working hard to make ends meet or sometimes there is no adult in the picture that is actually taking care of the child. The child is basically raising themselves…the values that they need to become good human beings aren’t coming from home, so they have to be taught somewhere. And so they had decided that school is the place that that needs to be taken up, and to a very greater extent I agree with that”(Teacher Nia, personal communication, March 26, 2014).

The visual culture content in Nia’s classroom is consistent with her perceived role as a conveyor of values, ethics, and morals. Posted in Nia’s 5th grade classroom there is a large sign across the back wall, next to the Pence behavioral guidelines, which reads “Remember, we all have choices. Choices have consequences. So be smart and make the right choice.” And near the front door there is a large poster reminding students of the ways they can show character – through wisdom, forgiveness, accountability, patience, and cooperation.

Teacher Tina studied visual communications in her home country, worked for some years as a graphic designer, and taught design at the high school and college levels before moving to the United States and getting a job teaching K-3 at Pence four years ago. She feels her visual arts background helps her when teaching young kids with low literacy skills. Her self-definition is that she is a “teacher and entertainer who performs each day” and her pedagogical approach aligns with her view of Pence’s teaching model: the responsibility for the learning process is on the students, and for them to learn, they have to be in control of themselves and know what consequences are. She tries to “encourage exploration with self-control, so that their brains can work better in two languages” through “a combination of toughness and high expectations and a creative and hopeful and positive attitude” (Teacher Tina, personal communication, April 28, 2014). Her current Kindergarten classroom is covered with images – of animals, plants, colors, etc. – all posted at the height of an average 5-year old. The classroom rules are posted high up on the wall, above the whiteboard, which you would not find if you were not looking for them.

In Teacher Hannah’s 4th grade classroom the space is divided into the working area (shared student work tables) and the reading/group seating area, which is a typical Pence classroom setup. The room is bright and very organized, particularly in the reading area and around the badge board by the classroom door; the badges are for students to quietly excuse themselves and take a badge when they need a hall pass to the restroom. All the posters listing class rules, school guidelines, class goals, etc. in the classroom are in Spanish, as is the day’s agenda, which is listed on the whiteboard at the front of the room.

Above her desk in the back corner of the room, however, is a poster in English, with a quote on it attributed to Albert Einstein: “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” Hannah’s view of her professional self is that she is a guide more than a traditional teacher, particularly because the students she teaches are at an age where they are starting to become independent people and independent learners. This is her third year teaching at Pence.

When it comes to her pedagogical practice and her perspective on the philosophy of teaching, Hannah explains, “[My approach] is focused around student voice. So trying to let students have as much power in the classroom as possible and giving them as much responsibility as possible... like the way we run the school with responsive classroom, it puts a lot of responsibility on the students, and they create their own classroom rules as part of the design, and they create their own school rules as part of the design too. So it’s kind of a little bit of both... I usually find whenever I teach something new it’s hard for me to think about it through that lens. Like we were teaching protractors, for example, in Math, and so those couple days of lessons were very like teacher-driven, direct instruction, ‘this is how we do it, now you practice, now we do it together, now we check.’ And classroom management-wise it’s never very successful for me, like it’s not the way I want to be teaching, and it’s not the way that they’re used to learning in this room. It’s always a little more frustrating, and then I get frustrated with them. So it’s the kind of thing where I have to remember that part of it when I’m teaching”(Teacher Hannah, personal communication, March 21, 2014).

The Pence school guidelines and mission statement are posted prominently in Teacher Leah’s classroom, just above where students’ daily writing workbooks are stored, and the mission statement poster has also been signed by each student in the class. At the front of the classroom, on one portion of the whiteboard, directions for expected student behavior are listed. And on the other end of the whiteboard there is another poster, connected with a recent content unit Leah taught, which reads “What are Civil Rights? What are ways to prevent conflict? Who has the power?”

Leah has been at Pence for four years, and describes herself as a teacher and a guide who enjoys that part of teaching where “I can kind of come along side and listen in and kind of advise from the side and find the thing that I need to teach.” This is a self-perception she has evolved into after over a dozen years in the profession, teaching first in a Christian school and then in the Philadelphia public schools before coming to Pence four years ago. She explains “When I first started teaching I didn’t have any teaching background. I was an English major and kind of fell into teaching. And I was strictly by the book…as I got more comfortable and took more classes I would say that I kind of have taken bits and pieces of everything. And so I think I want to see where kids are at, and I want to help them get to the next place. I really love books, and I love writing, and so I want them to love books and writing too, and I think I’m way more interested in that than figuring out what the Common Core [new national education standards] says right now. I’ve read the Common Core, and I’ve tried to think how that fits in, and sometimes I don’t quite understand what it’s asking me to do, and I much more want kids to love books and reading and writing…to me that’s introducing them to great things, sharing great things with them, encourage them in their writing, writing a lot. And to see their power in it, their choice, what they can do with it, that they can explore the world more, that they can make an impact on the world”(Teacher Leah, personal communication, April 7, 2014).

Teacher Audrey has been in the profession for almost 30 years, and at Pence almost since it opened. She views herself as a teacher, a resource for students and for her teaching team, and, because of her tenure here, as an informal school historian. Her role includes modeling emotional responsibility and truthfulness to her students so that they can “learn a confidence about their own abilities” which for Audrey “involves not just math but speaking, writing, articulating how you feel, communication…how to be responsible…how to speak to one another respectfully…just being civil, learning to take care of one another in a way that’s nice” (Teacher Audrey, personal communication, February 24, 2014). And in her classroom, the walls are almost entirely covered with student math projects, which are organized and lined up neatly, as are all the books and other materials in the room. The only messy space in the room is her desk, which is so laden with books and papers you cannot see its surface.

One coordinated example of how Pence shares its school culture visually (and socially) is through the end of year global citizenship concert. For the 2013-14 school year, the concert theme was identity, and student drumming, dancing, and singing performances were each linked to this theme. To publicly signal cohesive school identity to the students, teachers, and parents in attendance, the students wore a rainbow of Pence school t-shirts, each grade level in a different vibrant color. Events like this obviously have visual elements (and motivations or aims) that are far harder to ignore than posters or maps on hallway walls that one passes by every day. Through my role as researcher I noted every aspect of Pence visual culture incessantly, and individual responses to (or participation in) the visual culture context varied widely. Yet I observed that every teacher in the school was very aware of it at least once: when they had to block it out. For testing week during spring semester, teachers spent hours taping up construction paper in their rooms, as all text and every image on every classroom wall had to be completely covered for testing periods, per Pennsylvania’s state mandate.

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Invisible features: hidden aspects of teacher identity in an urban charter school by Martha Hope Carey is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.