Teachers' experiences with censorship : a qualitative study

The purpose of this study was to examine and describe teachers' experiences with school censorship. Teachers were asked to describe their school censorship experiences and to discuss their responses to those experiences. Qualitative research procedures were used to investigate the topic. The data for this study were collected through unstructured, open-ended interviews. Each interview was tape-recorded and transcribed, and the resulting protocols formed the data base for analysis. Thirteen teachers were identified and selected as participants in the study on the basis of their having had experiences with school censorship. They were teachers of two adjacent school districts, one a city and the other a county district, in the Southern Appalachian Mountains. The group included three primary grade teachers, two middle school teachers, and eight high school teachers. The data were analyzed through a three-component analysis procedure which included data reduction, data display and conclusion-drawing and verification. The results were divided into two main categories. The nature of the school censorship experiences among the participants in the study were broad and diverse but also shared common features. The 55 censorship episodes that made up the experiences of the 13 teachers in this study covered a wide range of types of censorship episodes and a variety of topics, from administratively-induced censorship to religious-based censorship. Teachers' responses to their school censorship experiences had affective, cognitive and behavioral dimensions. Their responses were strong, complex and largely negative, but also ambivalent in certain respects. Several major themes emerged from the study. Censorship experiences made it difficult for teachers to fulfill the responsibilities of their many roles. Censorship experiences were accompanied by a myriad of emotional responses including anger, anxiety, frustration, isolation and defeat. Teachers reported feeling threatened and vulnerable and a sense of diminished autonomy, freedom and control. Censorship experiences resulted in teachers' avoidance of potentially controversial topics, methods and ideas. The small, subtle, covert types of censorship experiences seemed to have as powerful an effect as did the big episodes that became public issues. Taken as a whole, the censorship experiences described by the participants in this study resulted in a pattern of cumulative, often imperceptible experiences which gradually and subtly altered teachers' thoughts, feelings and acts. This phenomenon has often been referred to as the "chilling effects of censorship."