Contextualizing Pedagogical Capacity: The Nexus Between Teaching and Learning

Open Access
- Author:
- Easley II, Jacob
- Graduate Program:
- Educational Leadership
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- July 07, 2004
- Committee Members:
- John Daniel Marshall, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
James F Nolan Jr., Committee Member
Debra M Freedman, Committee Member
John W Tippeconnic Iii, Committee Member - Keywords:
- comprehensive school reform
urban school reform
Capacity
reconstitution
teacing and learning innovations - Abstract:
- This case study takes place in an inner city, urban elementary school that has and continues to undergo various reforms. One of these is reconstitution, a drastic comprehensive school reform approach in which incumbent teachers and administrators in a chronic, low-performing school are replaced with new teachers and administrators in hope of spurring new working conditions and raising student achievement. Another is the 2001 reauthorization of the 1965 federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), more popularly known as the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLBA). Each act of reform has promised to bring about certain changes that would/will in return improve this particular school. The measure for improvement has and continues to be the results of students' performance on some sort of standardized assessment. The implementation of these high-stakes accountability reforms has directly shaped the context of schooling within this site. This study makes the claim that the core of education exists at the classroom level and is represented by the teaching and learning process, as mediated through relationships between teachers and their students. Teachers, however, hold particular perceptions about the extent to which top-down reforms affect their capacity for innovative teaching within the teaching and learning process. This study explores these perceptions. The results of this study affirm the idea of an educational core and demonstrate that teachers’ capacity for innovative teaching within the core is influenced by broader educational decisions and relationships beyond the classroom level. Such a finding highlights the reality that schools exist within and are responsive to larger socio-political systems such as school districts and local communities (Sarason, 1990, Noguera, 2003; Lipman, 1998). As a result, capacity is made complex, evolving from multiple levels (e.g., national, state, local, and building levels). Because the complexities of capacity directly affect teachers' innovative teaching and in turn their teaching influences students' learning, capacity becomes the nexus between teaching and learning. Implications include an examination of the language of student achievement, public deliberations about the current processes of schooling and school reform, and an interdisciplinary research approach toward understanding capacity as the dynamic nexus between teaching and learning.