ABS320 - Studying the meaning of teaching: One teacher across four years - Board 14

With this presentation, we hope to foster discussion about changing conceptions of teaching, what it means to use research interviews as spaces for reflection, and the role of the arts in spaces that are increasingly reluctant to include anything that does not fit within narrow parameters for performance and assessment. Ours is an ethnographic case study framed on notions of the social construction of meaning.  This study builds on the tradition of empirical research with novice teachers to investigate how they develop concepts of teaching—we extend these studies with an examination of a teacher during her first four years of teaching in a middle school. We wanted to know what teaching meant for an English language arts teacher with a self-identified goal of integrating visual and dramatic arts. Bounding the case to one teacher allowed us to focus on the teacher’s conceptions of teaching English over time and within one school. Findings indicate the following: the interviews were a space to imagine and evaluate teaching; time was a tool for attending to the nuances of meeting both the students' needs and her own; relationships with the first author as researcher and teaching team members provided resources for supporting her professional goals; and there were clashes of expectations about what the teacher wanted to accomplish and what other authority figures expected her to do.