Organic Intellectualism in Teacher Education: Students and Teachers as Critical Researchers Within and Beyond Classrooms

• In Event: Sticky Situations and Critical Spaces: ‬ ‪Complicating Research, Policy, and Praxis‬

Abstract

Objectives
Seeking to move teacher research “from the fringe to the forefront” of social justice efforts in schools, Cochran-Smith and Lytle argue that limiting the knowledge base for teaching to scholars’ interests has led to problematic discontinuities between teacher education and teachers’ experiences in-practice, as well as a “general lack of information about classroom life from a truly emic perspective” (1992, p. 300). Academic and institutional knowledges have long been valued over the organic intellectualism (Fine et al., 2001) of those who are most affected by educational and social inequities. In this paper, we explore how participatory action research (PAR) challenges this hierarchy and examine the generative interconnectedness of a co-curricular youth participatory action research (YPAR) project and a teacher preparation program.

Theoretical Framework
PAR, and particularly YPAR, seek to create spaces in which to engage marginalized voices in rigorous research inquiries that address inequities. Within YPAR, an identities-in-practice lens (Caraballo, 2011; Holland et al., 1998; Rubin, 2007) focuses on students' multiple selves and their navigation of multiple literacies in order to complicate existing structures and hierarchies. In this paper, we examine how students, educators, and researchers negotiate multiple identities, where particular classrooms, programs, schools, and/or institutions serve as figured worlds in which such identities are authored. We consider the possibilities and tensions at the intersection of such multiple identities and figured worlds in the ensuing partnerships among individuals and groups (of students, educators, and researchers) as well as institutions (school and universities).

Methods
This paper draws from a larger IRB-approved qualitative study of the experiences of high school students and preservice teachers in the context of a co-curricular YPAR seminar in a culturally and socioeconomically diverse urban school. The study engaged students as researchers and teacher candidates as facilitators in critical participatory research projects in which students developed their own multiple literacies and enacted social change.

Data Sources
Data sources include audio session recordings, interviews, field notes, and student artifacts. Students’ and preservice teachers’ narratives are analyzed as part of an ongoing iterative process (Bogdan & Biklen, 2007) to examine how the students’ and teacher candidates’ YPAR experiences informed their perceptions about literacies, curriculum, and pedagogy.

Results
Students and preservice teachers’ experiences during the YPAR project disrupt some of the divisions between various "roles" (student, educator, institution), as well as hierarchies of power and knowledge in/beyond institutions. Emerging themes indicate that students, preservice teachers, and researchers experienced the YPAR seminar as an empowering context in which all participants, regardless of their role, constructed new knowledge(s). These experiences led to generative dialogue about the roles and purposes of curriculum, pedagogy, and teacher preparation.

Significance
Seeking to better understand how identities and experiences are mediated by engagement in PAR, this analysis promotes reflexive critical meta-awareness (Souto-Manning, 2013) in partnerships between schools and universities. A YPAR model informed by an identities-in-practice lens promotes the conceptualization of teacher education as interrelated with students and preservice teachers’ multiple selves and experiences of curriculum and pedagogy within and across educational contexts.

Authors

• Limarys Caraballo, Queens College - CUNY

• Jamila Lyiscott, Teachers College, Columbia University