Professional Learning Communities: A Think Tank for Negotiating Critical Literacy Practices

This study was designed to investigate the effects of professional learning communities as a context for teacher learning, specifically as it applies to the negotiation of meaning and the application of trends in critical literacy instruction that span curriculum and broaden conceptions of instructional pedagogies.

I sought to answer three questions: What do teachers learn about Critical Literacy in a professional learning community?

How do teachers negotiate meaning within the professional learning community?

How do the teachers interpret this experience and describe what they perceive as impact on student learning?

I used qualitative methods of observation, audio-taped interviews and meetings, and collection of artifacts.

From the data, four case studies were used to describe what teachers learned about critical literacy, how they learned within the professional learning community, and what impact my role as researcher seemed to have on this work.

What I found was that a process of concept development took place in which teachers' understandings moved back and forth from abstract to concrete through opportunities to talk about both classroom practices and text.

I also found that my role as a participant researcher and facilitator in the group was relevant to the experiences teachers had.