Teacher Resistance to Implementation

Excerpt: When teachers first confront the requirement that they implement some new idea or method into their teaching, they can respond in any of several ways. If we view on a continuum the many possible responses to such a requirement, we will see on one end those teachers who flatly refuse to make any changes. They may rationalize that their pedagogy requires no change or that they already know better than curriculum designers and consultants what needs to occur in their own classrooms and\u27 even in classrooms in general. Jumping to the other extreme of our continuum, we find those teachers who chase down and study all the material they can find on the new method, who end up leading workshops on how to implement the new method, and whose sample classroom lessons or units eventually circulate in print so that others might see what successful implementation actually looks like. Of course, we recognize these extremes as extremes; these illustrations fail to represent the more moderate and more mixed reactions of the majority of teachers. Most teachers fall between my two characterizations. And most teachers likely experience feelings of willingness to implement the method and, simultaneously, frustration over exactly how to go about irnplementing curriculum changes that come their way (Doyle and Ponder 1978, Sieber 1972)

Betwixt and Between: Liminality in Teachers’ Lives and in the Pandemic

The pandemic has altered the ways educators carry out their work, having forced them to switch en masse in March, 2020 to online instruction and then to various combinations of online and hybrid instruction. Along with educational policy-makers, classroom educators and school leaders wonder when education will return to normal and the degree to which educational normal will look like it did prior to the Covid-19 pandemic. Educating during a pandemic fits the anthropological concept of liminality, of being between two states (introduced by van Gennep in 1909). After noting the origins and meaning of the concept of a liminal time or liminality and some Biblical examples of liminality, the article reviews three specific liminal times and spaces in educators’ careers: the tension some educators experience between church and academy, career transitions, and the transition from face-to-face instruction to online learning. The authors offer strategies educators can use to support their passage through each of those three liminal times and spaces