Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

Date

2026

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Department

Educational Psychology & Research

Committee Chair

Susan Nordstrom

Committee Member

Alexander Pratt

Committee Member

Alison Happel-Parkins

Abstract

This postqualitative dissertation challenges four decades of assumptions about who counts as a teacher and what it means to leave teaching. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari's (1987) concept of order-words (i.e., the restrictions and boundaries tied to words through presuppositions), I investigate how the teacher attrition literature has created and maintained teacher as an order-word that establishes specific boundaries around what it means to be a teacher. Through nearly 40 years of repetition across the Teacher Follow-up Survey, grey literature from federal agencies and think tanks, and empirical research, these boundaries have become naturalized, making them feel inevitable rather than constructed. However, where there are order-words, there are also pass-words, ways of moving through and transforming the restrictions order-words establish. To investigate how the term teacher functions as both order-word and pass-word, I interviewed six former K-12 teachers who remain in educational spaces, continue teaching work, and still identify as teachers. Drawing from antimethodology (Nordstrom, 2018), I map how teacher as an order-word works in participants' lives through participant focused vignettes. These vignettes show both the constraining work of the order-word and how participants create pass-words that open possibilities for thinking about teacher and teacher attrition differently. This work makes visible how some people counted as attrition continue teaching work in the education field and continue to identify as teachers, challenging how the field measures and understands teacher attrition. I discuss possibilities and openings this work creates for reconceptualizing teacher attrition, arguing that the field may conflate measurement (leaving K-12 classrooms) with concept (attrition), obscuring teaching work that continues across educational contexts.

Comments

Data is provided by the student.”

Library Comment

Dissertation or thesis originally submitted to ProQuest/Clarivate.

Notes

Open Access

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