Beyond Myths, Fetishes, and Checklists

Discovering Diversity's Place in Education, Evaluation, and Accountability

Bibliographic Data

ID8924181
AuthorsVirginia Worley (Oklahoma State University, corresponding author)
Year2011
Volume47
Issue1
Pages3-25
Publication date2011-01-31
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueEducational Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0013-1946 • E-ISSN: 1532-6993
PublisherTaylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/00131946.2010.524134
OpenAlexW2032093439
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited11

I examine pre-service elementary school teachers’ process of defining diversity as part of a state-mandated, high-stakes, teacher education portfolio benchmark; metaphors’ roles in their defining process; the evaluation mechanism, and the literal and metaphorical bench-mark boundary these pre-service teachers must reach to enter the profession. Using Foucault's analysis of the relation among words, things, and truth and Ogden and Richards’ definition theory as lenses, I analyze the dilemmas, ambiguities, negations, and contradictions these pre-service teachers encounter during the definition-writing process and their attempt to match their definitions of diversity to what they believe to be a concrete, absolute object, entity, or thing called diversity. Their belief that diversity is a concrete, fixed, discoverable Truth bumps against the possibility that diversity is ambiguous, negating, contradictory, and gigantic in scale. Institutionalized diversity promotes political and economic, institutional well being; discourse exposes itself as political power medium and source of subject formation. Ultimately, diversity explodes the epistemic underpinnings that lead to the expectation that one can reify diversity, wedge it “solidly in a space of visible reference points” (Foucault 1983, 17), and imprison it within institutional boundaries. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I thank Stacy Otto for critiquing this article at various stages of its development, offering helpful feedback, and providing encouragement along the way. I also thank the reviewers for their time, thoughtfulness, and feedback and the editors for continuing their service to the educational community. Notes 1. Although, to date, the professional education portfolio continues to be state-mandated, my university has increased its core concepts from 3 to 5 and added subconcepts to these five. Consequently, the PEU's members have objected to requiring preservice teachers to write essays for all these concepts and subconcepts. Although the preservice teachers are no longer required to write the diversity essay, I write using the present tense to communicate a sense of immediacy and to reflect the kinds of assignments teacher educators and state and national accreditors require preservice teachers to perform. 2. Originally, researchers drew data from 100, senior-level, preservice elementary school teachers’ diversity essays submitted within their state-mandated portfolios. Upon having secured permission, the researchers performed a discourse analysis of students’ essays. While independently analyzing the essays, the researchers recorded emergent themes and when comparing notes saw not only themes but discovered that preservice elementary school teachers were writing metaphorically. The researchers coded these themes, analyzed, interpreted, and drew inferences after examining each coded theme, category, and individual example for meaning and value. 3. Although assessment and evaluation are often used interchangeably, they do not mean the same thing. Assessment means what the assess in the word suggests: one assesses or sizes up what students have learned and identifies how one knows (evidence) students have learned it. When one assesses, one does not judge. Evaluation also means that one assesses or sizes up what students have learned and what they have come to know, that one has identified how one knows (evidence) students have learned and come to know. Unlike assessment, evaluation includes judgment. That judgment may take various forms: a grade, a written evaluation (typically identifying strengths and areas that need improvement), a journal of notes (similar to lab notes), etc. 4. Because at the time of the qualitative study, the diversity essays already existed as a PEU requirement, during my analysis, I do not describe, tell, or analyze what should be, but what is, a reality (and mandated assignment) over which the researchers, teachers, students, and evaluators at my university have little or no control. Because the requirement was part of the state-mandated, professional education portfolio, “Submission II,” the researchers were therefore unable to design a study during which they could collect data by conventional means. Instead, after preservice elementary teachers submitted their essays as part of “Portfolio, Submission II,” the researchers asked their permission to use the diversity essays for the study, sorted the essays to eliminate those who did not wish to participate, and to preserve anonymity, replaced names with numerical identifiers for those preservice elementary school teachers who agreed to participate in the research study. Important to note up front: my university's version of the state-mandated portfolio was established before No Child Left Behind (NCLB) was instituted. Thus, although my analysis has implications for NCLB, my focus is not on its policies, procedures, or implications. 5. At the time the data was collected and analyzed, there were three core concepts: diversity, integration, and professionalism. Here I examine the required essay for the core concept, diversity. 6. The sample of 100 essays is the essays written by those who signed the consent form agreeing to participate anonymously in the study. 7. In my state, until fall 2010, the university awards certification; the state grants licensure. 8. Members of the Professional Education Council have since replaced the original, three-leveled rubric with a four-leveled, scaled rubric. 9. In this mid-western state, those denied admission to the Professional Education Program and those expelled from the Program are ineligible for the state's alternative certification option. 10. C. K. Ogden lived 1889–1957; I. A. Richards lived 1893–1979. 11. I explain these terms and the relation among them as my analysis continues, especially at the end of section 2: “Defining Diversity: Producing The Truth or Entering the Heteroclite's Uncharted Zone?” 12. I contextualize Foucault's ([1973] 1983) assertion later in this section as my analysis progresses. 13. Their struggle emerges through their metaphors as indicated later in the paragraph but also through the fact that half or more consistently fail to meet expectations, need remediation, and remediate by rewriting their essays two or more times before they pass. I address this remediation later in the article. 14. US linguist William D. Whitney lived 1827–1894; Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure lived 1857–1913. In the “Immutability and Mutability of the Sign,” from his Course in General Linguistics, de Saussure (1916 [1983]) credits Whitney with theorizing the arbitrariness of the sign that CitationOgden and Richards (1923) name symbol. I use the 1916 date throughout for de Saussure's work because that is the date that two of de Saussure's students published class notes and other materials they compiled and published after his death and because I want to call attention to that date in relation to the date of Whitney's publication. 15. Interestingly, surrealist artist René Magritte gave an exposition in New York City entitled “Words and Things,” the same title to which Foucault ([1966] 1970) assigned his now well-known book The Order of Things, literally Words and Things, that caught Magritte's attention in the mid-1960s (CitationHarkness 1983). 16. Foucault ([1966] 1970, [1973] 1983) was particularly taken with the proto-surrealist painter Giorgio de Chirico's examples of visual non sequiter. 17. Please note that Charles Sanders Pierce (1839–1914), writing before CitationOgden and Richards (1923), also establishes a triangular relation among parts but names the parts differently than Ogden and Richards. Ogden and Richards use the notation symbol-reference-referent. Pierce uses sign-interpretant-object. Although like Ogden and Richards, Pierce maintains that the sign (symbol) causes the self, listener, reader to think a thought, for Pierce that thought is fairly insignificant until the self/listener/reader interprets it. Thus, his triadic notation: sign-interpretant-object. 18. In contrast to CitationOgden and Richards (1923), see CitationPierce (1991). 19. Again, all preservice teachers have the same requirements and use the same Portfolio Handbook to prepare their three, state-mandated, teacher-education portfolio submissions. 20. Please see endnote #3. 21. For an excellent analysis of racism and cultural pluralism, please see: CitationPalermo (2002). 22. Although asking “Whose knowledge is it?” is certainly not a new question, it surfaces here as if never before considered or as if ignored and neglected in efforts to quantify the unquantifiable. See, for example, CitationBelenky et al. (1997) and CitationCode (1991). 23. Preservice elementary school teachers repeatedly expressed this sense of diversity, a personified mist or fog creeping into classrooms or an invisible presence slowly moving in, felt but unidentifiable and uncontainable. 24. Although frequently overlooked, resistance or a way out of an apparently inescapable structure or situation is built into much of Foucault's work. Consider from Discipline and Punish (CitationFoucault 1977), for example: “resistance is to be found...in the prison with all its determinations, links, and the extrajudicial results; in the prison as the relay in a general network of disciplines and surveillances; in the prison as it functions in a panoptic regime” (305)

Diversity (politics · Epistemology · Sociology · Global Educational Policies and Reforms · Philosophy · Political Philosophy and Ethics · Religious Education and Schools

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