Such Stuff as PD is Made On: A Case Study of a Professional Development Cohort

In this qualitative case study, I examined how teacher instructional practices and beliefs around teaching literature were impacted after self-selecting into a sustained professional development opportunity called Bard Core. Specifically, I ask, 1. What are the perspectives of secondary ELA teachers as to how a self-selected, year-long, theater-based professional development impacted their professional learning, curriculum development, and/or instructional practice? And 2. How do the learning and experiences of the Bard Core program carry over into participants’ instructional practices and beliefs around teaching literature in general and teaching canonical literature specifically? Using Communities of Practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991) and the Historically responsive Literature Framework (Muhammad, 2020) as data analysis frameworks, I examined the experiences of the 18th cohort of Bard Core. After systematically analyzing the data, I found that the participants felt that they gained professional learning that they considered valuable and that Bard Core equipped participants with tools for curriculum development that they did not previously possess and facilitated a shift in thinking in terms of what was appropriate in their curriculum. Similarly, participants experimented with instructional practices and classroom activities they would not have tried or thought appropriate before Bard Core. Some of the Bard Core content, though, was universally adopted by all teachers, while some of it was universally ignored. In doing this work, the teachers who participated in Bard Core formed a Community of Practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998) where they were able to be vulnerable and leverage one another’s expertise in addition to the new content they were learning together. The implications of this study yielded important findings relevant to teachers and teacher educators who are interested in how to make literature instruction more culturally relevant, culturally sustaining, and historically responsive.