Beginning with the Particular: Reimagining Professional Development as a Feminist Practice

Abstract

This article analyzes the work of a long-term network of teachers, the Philadelphia Teachers Learning Cooperative, with a focus on their descriptive practices. Drawing on three years of ethnographic documentation of weekly meetings and a historical archive of meetings over 30 years, I characterize the teachers' knowledge about teaching and learning as a feminist stance, steeped in the particular. I argue further that the teachers' analysis of and knowledge about teaching and learning comes from a grounded, phenomenological standpoint that attends to the multiplicity, complexity, and uncertainty that characterize learning. Finally, I explore the ways the routines of this group allow teachers to develop a common language and set of practices to speak back to the restrictive mandates of the school district.

Notes

The original arguments of this article were developed with my colleague Thea Abu El-Haj for a paper delivered at the American Anthropology Association meetings in Washington, DC (Schultz & Abu El-Haj, 2001). A version of this article was presented at the American Educational Research Association meetings in New York (Schultz, 2008). Members of the Philadelphia Teachers Learning Cooperative, Particularly Lynne Strieb, Betsy Wice, and Rhoda Kanevsky, have made important contributions to this article and to my understanding of teaching over many years.

This research project, Twenty Years of Reflection and Action: Lessons from an Inquiry-Based Urban Professional Development Group, was funded by the MacArthur/ Spencer Professional Development Research and Documentation Program.