Abstract:
Whilst deficit discourses in classrooms and staffrooms are pervasive and dominant, there is some research which supports teachers disrupting deficit thinking and reconnecting with student "funds of knowledge". Processes for disrupting deficit knowledges tend to assume individual teacher construction of deficit views in conversation with other teachers, and include questioning and offering other metaphors to unsettle the familiar, in a space where new language about young people is engaged. Neoliberal thinking fosters a mechanistic, problem-based approach which positions teachers as transmitters of knowledge developed elsewhere, efficiently "delivering" enhanced student achievement. In this context, teachers are positioned as performers of Standards viewed largely through a lens of certain progression in relation to the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers. Such certainty in the outcomes misrepresents the micro-interactions of identity and knowledge formation in classrooms. Such a conception of teachers' work fosters deficit thinking about both students and teachers.
This paper examines both the development of a process for and the results of an appreciative self-appraisal of a teacher’s practice. The process illustrates that challenging deficit thinking, may be possible through an appreciative lens which provides both the "hesitation in friendship" and active "pause" in thought in a space for a disruption in self-assurance long enough to find an alternate way to speak to and about students and to come to understand the world differently. An appreciative lens becomes one element in a repertoire of activities which might assist with thinking outside the discourses in which we live in order to imagine schools with classrooms "full of human knowledge" which arise through creating spaces for learning "where identity, intellect, and imagination are negotiated between teachers and students" (Cummins, 2003, p. 58).
This paper examines both the development of a process for and the results of an appreciative self-appraisal of a teacher’s practice. The process illustrates that challenging deficit thinking, may be possible through an appreciative lens which provides both the "hesitation in friendship" and active "pause" in thought in a space for a disruption in self-assurance long enough to find an alternate way to speak to and about students and to come to understand the world differently. An appreciative lens becomes one element in a repertoire of activities which might assist with thinking outside the discourses in which we live in order to imagine schools with classrooms "full of human knowledge" which arise through creating spaces for learning "where identity, intellect, and imagination are negotiated between teachers and students" (Cummins, 2003, p. 58).