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Paper short abstract:

Based on fieldwork in France, Guinea, and the USA since 1976 and inspired by Tao (2016), a holistic view of teachers’ work includes not only pedagogical and other labor at school, but also labor to support one’s own family, challenging deficit talk about “teacher quality.”

Paper long abstract:

This essay proposes a holistic view of teachers’ work inspired by my field experiences studying teachers’ thinking and teachers’ work in three countries—France, the Republic of Guinea, and the United States—from 1976 to the present. It builds on the priorities in teachers’ lives, framed by Sen’s Capabilities Approach, that Sharon Tao identified in work with teachers in Tanzania and Nigeria. Thus it considers not only pedagogical work in the classroom and other work done in or for the school, but also family care work that teachers do to sustain their own households. Across contrasting settings in Europe, West Africa and North America, a holistic vision reveals that teachers have reasonable reasons for carrying out pedagogical work and school work as they do, even when work to earn a living or nurture family detracts from ideal pedagogy or actually hinders student learning. This essay illustrates that in affluent as well as "lower-income" countries the need to make a living, in gendered context, shapes teachers’ work and indeed the original choice of teaching as a profession. It also reminds reformers focused on the “quality” of teachers and of teaching to begin by asking, “What are the lives of teachers in this school like? How will the reform I propose interact with work they are already doing in the classroom, in the school, or at home?”

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Paper long abstract:

When does the workday end for a teacher? The answer is not as easy as identifying when the last bell of the school day rings. In the United States, half of teachers are considering quitting their jobs and teacher shortages and educator burnout are rampant (Carver-Thomas & Darling-Hammond, 2017). Research on teacher workloads (Newberry & Allsop, 2017) and workplace stressors (McCarthy et al., 2016) reveal a need to redefine and reexamine the daily tasks of teachers. This critical ethnography examines teachers’ perceptions of time and their constant negotiations of workplace-imposed policies and procedures which they must prioritize in order to aid in their workplace survival (Woods, 1983). Teachers exist in a context of ever-changing demands on their personal and professional lives. This study gives particular attention to the many extracurricular and community-based activities that are hallmarks of rural school communities, all enabled by the labor of teachers outside the traditional classroom. Situated within high-poverty rural contexts, which themselves, are grappling with “years of policy decisions that did not place them as a priority” (Theobald, 1997, p. 122), this study amplifies the daily challenges facing teachers as they operate as linchpins in a system that does not place their personal lives or health as a priority. Participants’ testimonies of personal costs they have incurred, including the need to “work through lunch” in order to fulfill the many obligations throughout their workday are shared as this study examines systemic factors that are perpetuating a never-ending workday for teachers.

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Paper long abstract:

While the common perception of teaching is of a work day which ends at 3:30, and three months of vacation in the summer, those who enter the profession find the reality to involve far more hours of work during the school year, and a far shorter break at the end. Many of these duties are unpaid, or at best come with a small stipend which does not make up for the added responsibilities. Meanwhile, teachers still have to deal with their own adult lives, caring for themselves and their families, while participating in their community or finding ways to maintain adult friendships.

Texas has a problem with a teacher shortage, exacerbated by public policies which demean and discredit public education in general and teachers in particular. In 2023, Governor Greg Abbott called four special sessions attempting to pass a school voucher program, while failing to increase teacher pay and only creating a token bonus for retired teachers. The Brazosport Independent School District, where I work as a substitute teacher, has a particularly high risk of losing teachers to industry, particularly STEM teachers, as the town was built around the chemical industry and the plants are always glad to hire experienced scientists for higher pay.

I plan to interview a combination of retired teachers, current teachers, and teachers who have left the classroom or profession before retirement, to determine if there were differences in expectations and support both inside and outside the classroom.

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Paper short abstract:

An anthropological perspective on early childhood education quality challenges the assumed universality of global measurement tools and reveals nuanced differences across key stakeholder perspectives on quality, which has implications for policy and teachers' work lives.

Paper long abstract:

Alongside global efforts to increase access to early childhood education (ECE) is a concomitant focus on developing tools to measure the quality of teaching and learning in ECE settings. For example, in response to Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4.2, which calls for ensuring all children have access to quality preprimary education, UNESCO, UNICEF, the World Bank, and the Brookings Institution developed the Measuring Early Learning Quality and Outcomes (MELQO) tool. Although universalizing measurement tools like MELQO assume that ideas about ECE quality are applicable regardless of context and local conditions, research has shown that ideas about what constitutes quality in ECE are far from universal (Tobin, 2005; Tobin et al., 2009; Yamamoto & Li, 2012). In this study, I paired video-cued ethnography (VCE) (Adair & Kurban, 2019; Tobin, 2019) with the comparative case study (CCS) approach (Bartlett & Vavrus, 2017) to interrogate the presumed universality of the notion of quality embedded in the MELQO tool. Through a new, virtual approach to VCE, developed in response to the conditions of COVID-19, I explored the perspectives of Tanzanian preprimary teachers, teacher educators, and policymakers vis-à-vis good teaching in preprimary. By bringing an anthropological perspective to the question of preprimary quality, my analysis illuminated important within-country differences in ideas about quality that have implications for preprimary teachers' work lives. My findings also challenge the relevance of a tool like MELQO in Tanzania, where pedagogical norms and the sociocultural context differs dramatically from Global North countries that MELQO's notion of quality reflects.

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Paper short abstract:

This proposal takes up an anthropology of education policy (Castagno & McCarty, 2018) to explore two historical moments that have contributed to the production of “bad teachers” as political subjects in the United States.

Paper long abstract:

This proposal takes up an anthropology of education policy (Castagno & McCarty, 2018) to explore the historical production of “bad teachers” in the United States. Analyzing reforms, policies, and a range of archival materials about teacher quality and teacher performance, I explore how educational institutions and popular discourses have made sense of “bad teachers.” To do so, I revisit two commonly explored moments in U.S. education history—the late-1950s and the mid-1980s (in the wake of Sputnik and A Nation at Risk respectively). Where educational research has commonly explored these moments as perceived crises of teacher quality or educational achievement (e.g. Johanningmeier, 2010), this proposal looks at the making of a specific political subject called a “bad teacher.” The “bad teacher” resides at the core of moments of educational crisis. Both periods reveal historically contingent features of this subject. At the same time, shared themes in how the “bad teacher” is racialized, classed, gendered, and the curriculum and pedagogy they allegedly undertake reveal persistent understandings of who and what counts as “bad” (and thus undesirable) within U.S. schools. Understanding “bad” subjects within a system also sees the ways in which undesirable ways of knowing and being carry productive potential to enact an educational otherwise. In this way, these histories entwine with a larger ethnographic project I have undertaken on the everyday experiences and educational practices of teachers who have been marked as “bad” within urban schools in the U.S.