How teachers see policy: school context, teacher inquiry, and policy visibility

ABSTRACT

This paper examines how teachers see policy and how the visibility of various aspects of policymaking are mediated by our school contexts. As a perspective from a K-12 classroom teacher conducting policy research with other classroom teachers, this paper also explores how teachers, in turn, might make our policy work visible to ourselves and the implications for teacher agency. Teachers in the study took part in a two-year participatory action research endeavour, joining school-based policy inquiry groups where we identified policies, mapped policymaking processes, and discussed the implications of our contexts. On one hand, these engagements highlight the central role a school’s institutional narratives and professional culture play in constructing the ways we see policy. At the same time, they point to how our seeing exceeds and moves with and through such constraints. With reference to postcolonial interpretations of agency, I describe how as part of inquiry teachers constructed spaces for ambiguity and alternative accounts, and in doing so movement and difference, in policymaking.

KEYWORDS:

• Education policy
• schools
• teachers
• agency
• participatory action research
• postcolonial theory

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank the teachers who contributed to this study and three anonymous reviewers for their valuable suggestions in the development of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Pseudonyms are used for all schools and individuals in Table 1. Participants at the author’s school consented to using real names and the name of the school, though have opted to use pseudonyms in solidarity with all participants.

2. The school’s mission statement is paraphrased.

3. All identifying markers have been typed over on the maps of policymaking (Figures 1–7) with generic labels.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Eric Shieh

Eric Shieh is a middle school teacher and founding team member of the Metropolitan Expeditionary Learning School in New York City, and a former policy strategist for the New York City Department of Education. His research and practice engages the policy work of teachers and schools, with particular attention to equity, race, and the arts in education.