This case study describes how the culture of a faculty at a junior-senior public high school was influenced by a grass roots initiative of restructuring. The efforts at educational change centered on a move toward detracking their once rigidly grouped classrooms. While a growing body of research literature looks at students in reorganized schools, particularly those that have undergone a process of detracking, this study adds to the relatively little work done regarding how these processes involve the culture teachers share. Utilizing interviewing, participant observation, school based documents and peer review this qualitative research offers perspectives of what change in the structure of a school can mean to those who work in the school. It draws a theoretical framework of understanding from the fields of Education and the Sociology of Education. Changes in the culture of a group of teachers is the focus of this work with the process of detracking providing an ever present back drop. The dissertation addresses how cultural change redefined personal perspectives and meanings shared by educators in a small school. These new meanings created an going dialogue about the role of those educators in issues such as school-wide leadership, in-school professionalism, serving as professional development specialists for hundreds of other educators and teacher empowerment. Finally this work presents how the work-day world of teacher's became a "crucible of change", forcing many educators to continually redefine what it meant to be a teacher.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UMASS/oai:scholarworks.umass.edu:dissertations-8300 |
| Date | 01 January 1992 |
| Creators | Nowicki, Joseph John |
| Publisher | ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst |
| Source Sets | University of Massachusetts, Amherst |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Source | Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest |
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