An Institutional Ethnographic Investigation of College Professors' Experiences Constructing Course Outlines

Institutional ethnography is the ontology and methodology that supports this investigation into the problematic of college teachers, officially known as professors, having more and more of their teaching energy being devoted to supporting the interests of market economics rather than the interests of students, college teachers, society, and the environment. I take the standpoint of college teachers and use interviews from college teachers who were about to use course outlines for the first time along with my own insider perspective as the entry point into an investigation of the social relations involved with college course outline work. I place my informants' experiences of teaching without course outlines in analytical contrast to the general way that another college orchestrates college teachers' work through the course outline construct. I do this by producing an extended Turner-style (2003) mapping of the local and extra-local web-like textual power that mediates college teachers' work at one particular community college. I argue that there are four nesting layers to the ruling relations power over college teachers' work with students. The first layer emphasizes the ideological work that college employees do to support global-finance capital. The second describes the managerial work done to set up the operational/production planning of teacher, course, class, and course outline work. The third reveals how faculty members are complicit in doing textual work to set up their own ruling. The fourth identifies the performance work that faculty members do to execute the textual rules of their prescriptive course outline commodity work. Additionally, I used a textual and discourse analysis of four union negotiation-related documents to reveal the way that texts interlock concepts from one to another to shrink teachers' professional autonomy. I find market economic ruling relations power embedded in a web of texts, work sequences, and work discourse connected to college course outlines. This power has the effect of deskilling college professors by both increasing the supervision and standardization of their work and decreasing opportunities for academic freedom. My textual mapping identifies places where opportunities for effective teaching and learning had been deleted and could be reclaimed.Ed.D.2017-04-08 00:00:0