All the different viewpoints on this ethnography (Tangled Up in School) are so interesting - as Anne stated, I, too, am looking forward to our discussion tomorrow.
Although there was so much to pay attention to, I was particularly fascinated by Nespor's accounts of Tota's "administration", Principal Watts' "innovations", and the effects they both had on teachers. I was reminded of an article I had read about a research study on an early childhood prevention program; the researcher of this study concluded that the intervention had been ineffective not due to the specific program intervention, but due to the poor implementation of the program, which could be traced back to tensions between the social service workers (who were serving the families in the study) and the administration of the social service agencies. The researcher used the term "parellel process" to describe the program's difficulty. According to the "parellel process" theory, "a dynamic in one part of the system reinforces similar patterns of interaction in other parts". This made me think of how both Tota's and Watts' relationships (though different) with teachers affected the teachers' relationships with their students...how this affected students' accounts to their parents...and so on. I don't have any conclusions, just a greater appreciation for the vast complexity of systems.
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