Poems of practice

Abstract

This dissertation is designed as an arts-based qualitative case study examining what seven 5th grade teachers and the principal learn when they engage in a job-embedded book study on culturally relevant pedagogy while reading The Dreamkeepers: Successful Teachers of African American Children. Research questions also explore what teachers and administrators learn and share about their professional practices as a result of participating together in the book study. With the use of poetic transcription, the teachers’ and the principal’s voices are re-presented as data through poetic forms such found poetry, I-poems, Haiku, Pantoun, and free verse. Broad themes are developed to organize the poems into a suite of poems for analysis. Poetry evokes the emotions and language from participants that may have otherwise gone unnoticed employing traditional qualitative methods. Exploring culturally relevant pedagogy through the book study, teachers learn to create knowledge construction zones for themselves, each other, and their students. They acknowledge the value of being more reflective about their practices, and often share their reflections through stories allowing the principal to learn more about the teachers beyond their pedagogical lives. Book studies are a viable means of professional development for studying the impact of sensitive issues such as culture. Scheduling sessions and establishing trust among the teachers and administrators significantly impact book studies as professional development. This study connects to a second research study of Dreamkeepers at the same research site with kindergarten teachers as book study participants. The researcher for the second study, (Faculty Book Clubs in an Urban Elementary School: Exploring the Power of Text, Conversations, and Stories to Support the Learning Needs of Teachers and Administrators) is the assistant principal who employs narrative storytelling as the method of analysis. The principal and the assistant principal as participant researchers for their individual studies utilize a convergence of analysis to report combined research findings.