Voices of resilience from the bottom rungs: The stories of three elementary core French teachers in Ontario

Abstract

This paper reports on a study that used activity theory (AT) as a framework to understand the dialogical relationship between three elementary Core French (CF) teachers' personal and professional experiences and their literacy teaching beliefs and practices. This study used a case study design collecting data from three different teachers in three different locations by means of semi-structured interviews to help capture teachers' perspective of their professional experiences. The interviews exposed the teachers' creativity in dealing with concerns about their personal and professional goals and (limited) resources available, documented facilitating or constraining effects on the community that operated within the same activity system, and identified unspoken agendas of their wider professional communities. The analysis of the teachers' narratives reveals that the definition of the status and role of CF within the Canadian educational context is an essential source of tension that affects the teachers' teaching practices and their sense of professional identity.