Abstract:
Strategies designed to improve educational systems have created tensions in
school personnel as they struggle to respond to competing demands of ongoing
change within their daily realities. The purpose of this case study was to investigate
how teachers and administrators in one elementary school made sense ofthese
tensions and to explore the factors that constrained or shaped their responses.
A constructive interpretative case study using a grounded theory approach was
used. Qualitative data were collected through document analysis, semi-structured
interviews, and participant observation. In-depth information about teachers' and
administrators' experiences and a contextual understanding oftension was generated
from inductive analysis of the data.
The study found that tension was a phenomenon situated in the context in
which it arose. A contextual understanding of tension revealed the interactions
between the institutional, personal, and emotional domains that continually shaped
individual and group behavioural responses. This contextual understanding of tension
provided the means to reinterpret resistance to change. It also helped to show how
teachers and administrators reconstructed identities and made sense in context.. Of
particular note was the crucial nature of the conditions under which teachers and
adlninistrators shaped meaning and understood change. This study sheds light on the
contextual intricacies of tension that may help leaders with the complex design and
implementation of educational change..
