This study looks closely at the feminized profession of elementary teaching during the epidemic that defines the current educational policy climate, particularly since No Child Left Behind. As a profession that is not considered to be particularly powerful, elementary teachers provide a feminist and theoretically messy location to study ways that educational policy becomes transformed through complex processes of implementation.
This study reframes educational policy analysis with the introduction of a new hybrid model comprised of Foucauldian power theory and grounded work. By applying Gore’s (1995) “taming” of Michel Foucault’s theories of power in Power/Knowledge (1980), the researcher posits a model of the discursive structures of policy and teachers. These discursive structures are characterized by distinctive discourse patterns, specific power tools, and teacher subject positions. Through qualitative iterations of interviews and the use of a theoretical typology to sample elementary teachers over the course of a year and a half, subjugated knowledges of the lived effects of reform became visible.
To provide foundation to this alternative means of viewing policy analysis, the literature review traces the historicity of agency that has traditionally defined teachers throughout organizational theory, psychological analysis, and critical studies. As a post-structural break from the analysis of teacher agency and the influences of institutional structures, the methodology iteratively unfolds to map power, discourse analysis, and the shifting locations of elementary teacher subject positions.
Though the primary findings describe powerful teacher silences as indicative of deference and resistance during continuous reform, critical subject positions also emerged. These subject positions surfaced the potential for theorizing conceptions of post-agency. Elementary teachers questioned not only policy constraints upon their daily work but also their personal attachments to discourses that define their very identity.
The study concludes with considerations for administrators and policymakers to incite a conversation with teachers beginning with the question of “Why these policies now?” The researcher encourages a systematic reframing of policy creation and implementation that relies upon questions of “why” rather than the traditional focus toward consistent refinements of “how.” Through retrenching teachers within policymaking, it is hoped that the educational system would be reinvigorated and sustained through teacher engagement with the norms that define their profession.