Year: 2016
Type: dissertation
Study design: Observational Study
Abstract: Changing the face of Ontario’s teachers is a topic that draws both ardent support and profound criticism by those closest to school governance. It surfaces questions about teacher quality, student achievement, inequity, diversity, politics, public trust, the past, the present, and the future. In the centre are teachers applying for jobs, and principals making decisions about whom to hire, and why. Influencing these decisions are a number of elements that range from the rational procedures that underlie human resources management to the intuitive, difficult to define factors borne of principals’ experiences and perspectives on teacher excellence. This study attempts to examine the processes at play as principals go about hiring teachers for the specific purpose of diversifying the teacher complement in their schools. Despite pressure from public policy since the 1980s, movement towards greater diversity in the teacher workforce has been slow, showing only modest change while the ethno-racial diversity of Ontario’s large urban centres approaches or surpasses fifty percent. Surveys from nearly a quarter of the principals in District A (a large, suburban school district in the Greater Toronto Area) and follow-up interviews with ten of their colleagues provide data that reflect how principals position diversity relative to other teacher qualities when hiring, their understanding of policy intimating the need for more teachers from diverse backgrounds, and the internal and external hurdles they face when hiring teachers. The data also show that these factors do not often include dimensions of teachers’ diverse identities. This finding remains surprisingly consistent among principals across variables such as experience, the number of interviews they conduct, and the student diversity of their respective schools. Data collected from personal interviews, however, show more nuanced differences between principals’ hiring stories and reflect a strong, unresolved tension between a belief in the benefits of teachers from diverse backgrounds and the hiring decisions that manifest this belief. Of note: the vast majority of participants in both the survey and interviews self-identify as White European. As such, the data are interpreted as a representative sample of principals in District A, but also as the prevailing identity of those charged with hiring teachers.
Source: TSpace (University of Toronto)
Author: William David Jack
Language: English
Subfield: Education
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2613719605