"WE HAVE TO MAKE SCHOOL MORE HUMAN FOR KIDS": TENNESSEE TEACHERS RESPOND TO AUTHORITATIVE DISCOURSES IN ENGLISH EDUCATION

Abstract

In this qualitative study, I interviewed seven high school English teachers from Tennessee about their values and beliefs regarding English education. Within Bakhtin's (1981) framework of authoritative discourses, I explored the history of how accountability and autonomous literacy measures in Tennessee have been enacted as part of a larger national discourse that deprofessionalizes teachers and dehumanizes teachers and students (Street, 1984). I then conducted a thematic analysis using emotion and values coding to determine participants' attitudes and responses to dominant educational discourses (Braun & Clark, 2006; Saldaña, 2021). Teachers voiced conflict with discourses that affected their values concerning professional expertise, respectful support, and humanized learning, offering both strategies for opposition as well as desires for future changes. After having identified these themes, I invited participants back for collaborative discussion groups, in which they worked in pairs to create a manifesto that documented belief statements and how to enact those beliefs in their own practices as educators. The process of working together to write this manifesto allowed teachers to create a counter-discourse to disrupt the harmful and dehumanizing practices associated with accountability and autonomous literacy discourses (Bloome & Green, 2015; Carillo, 2019; Davis & Vehabovic, 2017; de los Rios, et al, 2019; Freire 1970/2008; Gee, 2015; Giroux, 1988; Hannah & Ashby, 2022). These teachers collectively developed a vision for English education that recognized teachers as intellectuals and experts within a vibrant community of practice, deserving of respect and support, who enact a sociocultural, critical, and humanizing approach to literacy with their students (Ahmed, 2016; Freire 1970/2008; Giroux, 1988; Lave & Wenger, 1991; Naqvi, 2015; Rosenblatt 1938/1995; Street, 1984). This project provides a potential and flexible structure for teachers in Tennessee and elsewhere to collectively and continually resist educational and literacy discourses that dehumanize them and their students.