Building Teacher Learning Communities Through The Transformation Of Organizational Discourse

Various approaches to teacher development received attention of different degree in different eras. The current social conditions are on the turn from modernity to postmodernity. Echoing with the fast, compressed, complex and uncertain features of the postmodern world, ecological perspective comes into its own. Teacher development is recognized to be related much to one of the contextual factors, teacher organizations. Literature on organizational change and educational reform indicates the inclination of the communitarian model for school organization which promotes open flow of information, flexible roles of members and their cooperation. By drawing on the community theories developed by Lave and Wenger (1991) and Wenger (1998) as well as the underpinning social learning theory, this thesis applauds the view of building teacher learning communities.Out of the practical concern of the contextual factors of college English teacher development, the study attempts to ethnographically investigate the existent common Teaching and Research Groups to show the possibility of transforming the current teacher organizations into teacher learning communities and to shed light on how a learning community may be built.A case study was conducted to a Teaching and Research Group (TARG) of the College English Department at a university. It adopts discursive approach to the organization, focusing on the interactions during the collective lesson plan activities. Fairclough's version of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) supplies the major analytical framework for this study. It is further enriched with Systemic Functional Linguistics and other social theories.The analysis is categorized into two dimensions, one focuses on the ideational meaning and another focuses on interpersonal meaning. The results show that two major topics in the collective lesson plan activity are conformity and intensification, which represents the managerial and normative discourse where the diversity of individual teachers is suppressed and personal meaning of participating into the TARG's activity is obliterated. The analysis reveals institutional genre resides in the...