"It's Much:" Teacher Collective Sensemaking and Affective Experience with Mandated Literacy Curriculum

Abstract

This dissertation is an ethnographic study of teachers’ sensemaking and experience with literacy curriculum and reform policy while planning. It was implemented with a rhizomatic approach which frames planning meetings as potential events and considers the plans, understandings, feelings and possibilities that emerge and endure through them. Analysis reflects the literacy planning of a second-grade team over the course of a school year. While a variety of data was generated and collected , the analyses reported in this dissertation all connect to formal and informal planning meetings, which were the only video-recorded interactions of the study. Analysis was conducted with a variety of discourse-analytic, post-structrual, and participatory approaches around the teaching team's sensemaking and experience with planning and curricula, and the identities, concepts, and capacities that endured beyond them. Findings traced discursive strategies employed during planning, how curricula and present and past policies constrained sensemaking, and narrowed but contested identities and capacities that emerged.