Week 7/8 – Stress – Knowledge Integration and Project Planning: Data, Inequality and Society (2022-2023)

A little late in posting this week:

Though I have not fully come to a conclusion on what my final project will be, discussions with peers and through courses has helped to identify a good route for what my project will center around. I believe I have officially settled on discussing the retention of teachers, however, I am still stumped on exactly what aspect of teacher retention to choose. There are many spaces in which one could look at how public perception affects teacher retention: how perception affects pay, prestige, work load, minimum job requirements, etc. while I would like to cover all of these topics, this might be too broad of a stroke to take with regard to my project, especially if I am interested in a comparison of sorts across different communities.

Where?

I am looking at a comparison and I have to decide where my study will take place. Will I compare two different countries or different counties? While I would like to compare a country and the United States, this seems to be an impossible undertaking for this project. How do you get the understanding of perception for an entire country in less than a year? I am leaning towards discussing and looking into two different school districts in the United States for my study, this way it is a little more centric and achievable to cover. I have connections in both PGCPS (Prince George’s County Public Schools in Maryland where I used to work) and CPS (Chicago Public Schools in Illinois) that I could use to my advantage, and those two school districts have a great deal of similarities and differences between them that could aid in my comparison.

Methods

I believe I am interested in completing an ethnographic study and using data from that study to create a relationship between perception/attitudes and teacher retention. Using surveys, interviews, and literature I would be able to pull enough information to develop a theory behind the poor retention of teachers in the United States. I am also thinking about presenting my ideas through an informative movie of sorts, so interviews and surveys would help with that method of publishing.

-Kate 🙂