Typically, studies of educational policy focus on measuring the effects of a policy. However, I am interested in the process of a policy: how does a legislation, a piece of writing, or a program become something? I gather that important, but often missed, factors are the ultimate “users” of a policy: teachers, parents, and students, for example. I typically use “neo-institutional” (Powell & Colyvas, 2008), interpretive/sense-making (Spillane, 2004; Yanow, 2000), and critical discourse (Fairclough, 2015; Gee, 2014) theories to frame this work, as such perspectives highlight the central role of “cultural scripts”—meta-narratives, discourses, or major “storylines” (Hamann, 2011)—in developing policies and organizations.
My research questions in this area have included: How does public discourse shape the implementation of new bilingual education policies? How do federal accountability policies shape schooling at the local level? How do elementary-aged children understand their schools’ classroom policies?
In the 2020s, I have moved to designing community-engaged partnerships to explore how educational policies and practices can best support newcomers. In one project, a rural school district asked for our support to explore ways to enhance the graduation rates of their recently-arrived teenagers from Guatemala; I have been working with a Guatemalan graduate student to share promising practices with the district and to ask students directly what they think they need to be successful. Meanwhile, with other colleagues, I have worked with the Missouri Office of Refugee Administration to examine the opportunities and barriers that school districts face when trying to access federal funds to support refugee students and families. Policy implications of these two projects are forthcoming!
Publications:
- Dorner, L., Moon, J. Freire, J., Gambrell, J., Kasun, S., & Cervantes-Soon, C. (2023). Dual language bilingual education as a pathway to racial integration? A place-based analysis of policy enactment. Peabody Journal of Education, 98(2), 185-204.
https://doi.org/10.1080/0161956X.2023.2191566 - Dorner, L., Harris, K., & Willoughby, B.* (2022). Policy enactment during a pandemic: How one school responded to COVID-19 in negotiation with a non-profit partner. AERA Open. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/23328584221078328
- Dorner, L., Cervantes-Soons, C., Heiman, D., & Palmer D. (2021). “Now it’s all upper-class parents who are checking out schools:” Gentrification facing two-way bilingual policy enactment across scales, contexts, and stakeholders. Language Policy, 20(3), 1-27. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10993-021-09580-6
- Dorner, L., Bonney E.*, Moon, J.,* & Otis, A.* (2021). Dueling discourses in dual language schools: Multilingual “success for all” versus the academic “decline” of Black students. In N. Flores, N. Subtirelu, & A. Tseng (Eds.), Bilingualism for all? Raciolinguistic perspectives on dual language education, pp. 88-110. Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters.
- Kim, S., & Dorner, L. (2020, online). School district responses to cultural and linguistic change: Competing discourses of equity, competition, and community. Journal of Language, Identity, & Education. https://doi.org/10.1080/15348458.2020.1753197
- Dorner, L., Crawford, E., Jennings, J., Sandoval O. & Hager, E. (2017). I think immigrants “kind of fall into two camps:” Boundary work by U.S.-born community members in St. Louis, Missouri. Educational Policy, 31(7), 669-687.
- Dorner, L. (2015). From global jobs to safe spaces: The diverse discourses that sell multilingual schooling in the U.S. Current Issues in Language Planning, 16(1&2), 114-131. https://doi.org/10.1080/14664208.2014.947013
- Dorner, L. (2015.) From relating to (re)presenting: Challenges and lessons learned from an ethnographic study with young children. Qualitative Inquiry, 21(4), 354–365. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800414557824
- Dorner, L. & Layton, A. (2013). What makes a “good” school? Data and competing discourses in a multilingual charter network. In D. Anagnostopoulos, S. Rutledge, & R. Jacobsen (Eds.), The infrastructure of accountability: Mapping data use and its consequences across the American education system, pp. 145-162. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Educational Press.
- Dorner, L. (2012). The life course and sense-making: Immigrant families’ journeys toward understanding educational policies and choosing bilingual programs. American Educational Research Journal, 49(3), 461-486. https://doi.org/10.3102/0002831211415089
- Dorner, L. (2011). US immigrants and two-way immersion policies: The mismatch between district designs and family experiences. In D. Tedick, D. Christian, and T. Fortune (Eds.), Immersion education: Practices, policies, possibilities, pp. 231-250. Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters.
- Dorner, L. (2011). Contested communities in a debate over dual language education: The import of ‘public’ values on public policies. Educational Policy, 25(4), 577-613. https://doi.org/10.1177/0895904810368275
- Dorner, L., Spillane, J., & Pustejovsky, J. (2011). Organizing for instruction: A comparative study of public, charter, and Catholic schools. Journal of Educational Change, 12, 71-98. DOI:10.1007/s10833-010-9147-5
- Dorner, L. (2010). English and Spanish “para un futuro” or just English? Immigrant family perspectives on two-way immersion. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 13(3), 303-323. https://doi.org/10.1080/13670050903229851