Managing dilemmas: Uncovering moral and intellectual dimensions of classroom life.

Abstract

This dissertation combines discourse analysis with an ethnographic approach to investigate how teachers manage teaching dilemmas. The moral and intellectual dimensions of teaching are also illuminated through the analysis of how teachers manage ongoing tensions that constitute the dilemmas. One site was a classroom of 5-year-old children in Reggio Emilia, Italy; the others, in Michigan, were 3<super>rd</super>/4<super>th</super> grade classrooms with the same teacher in two schools, and a 7<super>th</super> grade language arts classroom. The researcher closely collaborated with the teachers and students to co-construct interpretations of salient events, theoretically defined as telling cases. This study builds on the concept of manner in teaching, in which manner is defined as human conduct that expresses virtue, consistent with a relatively stable disposition or character trait (Fenstermacher, 1992), and it is meant to add to descriptive theories about how classroom climates are established, by showing <italic>what</italic> moral and intellectual understandings are constructed over time, and <italic>how</italic> they are constructed by members of classrooms through language. Understanding how these teachers manage dilemmas entailed examining the dynamic processes of social interactions that reveal what moral and intellectual virtues are valued and what they mean in the local context of the classroom's culture. These teachers intentionally made use of teaching and learning opportunities as they arose either serendipitously or because the teacher planned for them in order to manage insoluble, ongoing dilemmas. The framework for descriptive analysis enabled findings within the following categories: Methods; academic, social, and civic goals and specific aims within those categories; student take up; and ongoing dilemmas found within issues of social interactions, student differences, community awareness, and curriculum. This study describes each classroom, through illustrative examples, as its own cultural world, with roles and relationships that are locally defined in complex social contexts, as well as the many commonalities across the cases. Classroom climate does have an impact on moral and intellectual growth. This study argues that if we are to fully consider the consequences of current reform efforts, we must understand the significance of cultural contexts and moral and intellectual dimensions of classrooms that lie at the heart of practice.