A year ago, I shared my working dissertation abstract. I’m now writing my final dissertation chapter, and I wanted to share an updated version of my dissertation abstract.  Between now and my spring 2011 defense, it may change slightly, but this reflects where I’m at now.

The Nexus of Continuity and Change: Digital Tools, Social Identities, and Cultural Models in Teacher Professional Development

Prompted by calls for research on technology-focused professional development, this dissertation investigates how teachers’ participation in learning communities influences technology integration within the secondary English curriculum. The year-long multiple-case embedded research study draws on cognitive anthropology and sociocultural theory to examine how English teachers’ everyday discourse reveals their cultural models, pedagogical beliefs, and instructional practices with literacy and technology. In addition, it attends to the role of dialogic narratives in shaping teachers’ identities in ever-changing learning environments. Situated within a reform-oriented approach to professional development, the analysis focuses on teachers’ discourse at a micro level to understand how their pedagogy is shaped by macro-concepts, social institutions, and cultural shifts. While digital tools can shape adolescents’ engagement in participatory learning, multimodal authoring, and critical thinking, findings from this study indicate that the ways in which these practices take root in the English curriculum are still very much dependent upon teachers’ beliefs, values, and skills. Technology integration can be supported by professional development that features: hands-on learning with digital tools and new literacies; sustained dialogue around teachers’ curricular goals and students’ learning outcomes; the ongoing analysis of students’ digitally mediated work; a view of knowledge as a social construction rather than as a commodity; a recognition that school-based discourse shapes teacher identity; and an understanding that teachers’ cultural models about language, literacy, and technology impact their pedagogy.

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