Noonan, J., Submitted.
An affinity for learning: Teacher identity and powerful professional development.
Journal of Teacher Education.
AbstractProfessional development (PD) for teachers is widely variable in its effectiveness. Efforts to improve PD at scale are complicated by the tremendous heterogeneity among teachers: what works for one teacher may work not at all for another. Using the lens of professional identity to analyze teachers’ perceptions of PD, I present and discuss five in-depth teacher accounts of their most powerful professional learning experiences, concluding that professional identity is a durable (but malleable) filter through which teachers interpret professional learning. I offer implications for how a better understanding of professional identity could be used to improve PD design and policy.
Fay, J., Submitted.
Injustice and School Closure.
AbstractSchool closure is a recent, hotly contested instantiation of school reform. Public disputes about school closure also reflect fundamental disagreement about the nature of justice. I draw on Nancy Fraser’s notion of “abnormal justice”—in short, the sense that modern justice discourse lacks a common grammar—to clarify the content of closure disputes in three ways. First, I explain why and how opposing claims about school closure rest on very different notions of what justice is and what justice requires. Second, I describe the normative force of such claims through three distinct forms of injustice: maldistribution, misrecognition, and misrepresentation. Third, I argue that notion of abnormal justice shifts our theoretical imagination to the identification and analysis of the relationships among the different forms of injustice implicated in instances of school closure.
Noonan, J., Submitted.
The tacit assumptions of teaching and learning: Using deliberative democratic theory to improve professional development.
Professional Development in Education.
AbstractFor decades, researchers and policymakers have looked to professional development (PD) as a promising tool to improve teacher practice and student learning. However, despite its promise, PD is widely perceived as being unable to realize its potential. In this conceptual paper, the author suggests that one reason for this gap between PD's potential and its perceived ineffectiveness is its alignment with a sociopolitical framework that prioritizes efficiency. Numerous past attempts to improve PD have failed to address underlying assumptions about teaching, learning, and human relationships embedded in this efficiency framework. As an alternative, the author proposes a new deliberative framework that is more compatible with learning principles and thus more likely to improve learning across contexts and at scale.
