Rights, duties and spaces of agency amidst high-stakes testing: Narrative positioning as resource for teacher agency

Abstract

Purpose

By recognizing high-stakes testing as a key constraint to teacher agency, this paper aims to provide a close analysis of one teacher’s testing narrative to illustrate how emerging positioning is relative to high-stakes testing shapes perception of pedagogical agency.

Design/methodology/approach

Data were generated through a series of semi-structured interviews with an early career fourth-grade teacher, Ms Moore, in a school facing pressure to raise test scores. Using theoretical lenses of narrative positioning and a linguistic anthropological centering of constraint and emergence, 67 narratives of accountability were analyzed, with particular focus on how Ms Moore positioned herself relative to other actors involved in high-stakes testing and the consequent rights and duties these positions afforded.

Findings

In narrating the constraints of high-stakes testing, Ms Moore positioned herself relative to three groups involved in high-stakes testing: “purposefully tricky” test creators, “disjointed” administrators and “worried” students. The rights and duties associated with three positions varied with respect to two dimensions – proximity and hierarchy – in turn providing her distinct resources for responding to the pedagogical constraints of high-stakes testing.

Practical implications

Teachers might use positioning analysis as a tool to locate possibilities for agency amidst high-stakes testing, both by exploring the resources afforded by their positioning and by considering how alternative positions might afford different resources.

Originality/value

These findings suggest that high-stakes testing serves as a dynamic and perhaps malleable constraint to teacher agency. Teacher positioning, particularly relative to hierarchy and proximity, provides possible resource for responding to such constraints.

Citation

Taylor, L.A. (2019), "Rights, duties and spaces of agency amidst high-stakes testing: Narrative positioning as resource for teacher agency", English Teaching: Practice & Critique, Vol. 18 No. 2, pp. 204-217. https://doi.org/10.1108/ETPC-11-2018-0098