Graduation Term

2013

Degree Name

Doctor of Education (EdD)

Department

School of Teaching and Learning

Committee Chair

Lara J. Handsfield

Abstract

In this dissertation, the researcher employed de Certeau's theoretical insights into cultural production in everyday life to examine how literacy coaches and teachers discursively negotiated issues of identity, power, and positioning during coaching interactions. The study also explored how literacy coaches and teachers enacted emotions within these discursive negotiations of identity, power, and positioning; and how physical, social, and ideological spaces were shaped by and reflected in coaching interactions. Data were generated during a yearlong qualitative study of literacy coaches and teachers interacting within a mid-size, suburban district in the U.S. Midwest. The researcher used a microethnographic approach to discourse analysis to closely examine brief, video-recorded interactions between coaches and teachers. Other data sources included semi-structured interviews, field observations, and artifact collection. Findings demonstrate how dominant Discourses of best practices, teacher development, collaboration, and coaches' credibility were simultaneously reproduced, resisted, and appropriated within the coaching interactions. Coaches and teachers interacted within conditions of vulnerability as they attempted to maintain identities as "good" coaches and teachers and negotiated understandings of what professional learning means, what counts as relevant knowledge for instructional decision making, and who decides. These findings should encourage coaches and teachers, as well as administrators and educational policy makers, to acknowledge the multiplicities, uncertainties, and ambiguities of professional development and to incorporate less dominant ways of knowing and being into professional learning communities.

Access Type

Dissertation-Open Access

DOI

http://doi.org/10.30707/ETD2013.Hunt.C

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