A principal's autoethnography: Literacy development and school-reform efforts across 22 years

The American public has been exposed to intense deliberations relating to the real and perceived inadequacies of public education and in particular, to the arguments about the improvement of reading instruction in our schools. At the center of these debates are the teacher and the principal, but who speaks for the educator? This dissertation argues that these educators must speak for themselves because they have much to add to school reform discussions.;While the professional literature abounds with the need and solutions for school reform efforts most solutions fail to consult the stakeholders within the actual schools. This autoethnography describes and brings meaning to the longitudinal school reform efforts within one school site, Lake Vista Primary School (pseudonym), located entirely within the boundaries of a native nation in the Southwest as documented through the daybook (journal) entries of one school principal. This thesis describes the struggle of one principal and his staff to understand their roles within the learning-teaching process at the school and with how to best ensure that all children within that school receive an excellent literacy education as defined as those specifically related to the development of the school's integrated language literacy program. This thesis also argues that one way of representing this complex network of school reform efforts is to seat them at the intersection of four competing influencing networks: the personal, the professional, the internal cultural and the external cultural. As Henry Giroux (1981) reminds us in Ideology, Culture and the Process of Schooling, we need to comprehend "the world holistically as a network of interconnections." This dissertation speculates that the list mentality of our quick-fix, American society persists in teaching the American people to approach the challenges of school reform as if they existed "in isolation, detached from the social and political forces that give them meaning" (p. 46). This dissertation demonstrates that they do not.