Paper Summary
Share...

Direct link:

Rupturing Commonsense Notions of Teaching, Learning, and Culture

Sun, April 19, 8:15 to 9:45am, Marriott, Floor: Fifth Level, Kansas City

Abstract

This paper examines undergraduates learning as they engaged in mediated-reflective practices in the El Pueblo Mágico social design experiment. This study was concerned with understanding novice undergraduate teachers’ shifts in ‘common sense’ notions of teaching, learning, and culture—key concepts in teachers’ development of pedagogical practices, of particular consequence when working with nondominant populations.

The notion of common sense points to the unconscious actions that are employed by individual actors, grounded in social contexts and mediated by dominant ideologies (Gramsci, 1999; Haney-Lopez, 2003). From a cultural historical perspective, common sense, then, is culturally mediated, and left unexamined becomes part of the everyday and is normalized over time (Vygotsky, 1978). For this paper, we define common sense as nontensions held across activity systems or learned, sociocultural practices. Common sense is an important units of analysis, as it can perpetuate unexamined assumptions with consequence in classrooms. Examining common sense notions around teaching, learning, and culture are fundamental to social design experiments and teacher education. Mediated-reflective practices allow educators to create “mirrors,” or designed reflection to aid in seeing one’s own common sense notions. As individuals name and recognize actions, they begin to “make more conscious decisions about moment-to-moment organization of learning” (Gutierrez & Vossoughi, 2010, p.103).

To analyze common sense notions and their shifts over time, we collected 35 hours of classroom interactions, 30 hours of audio from the instructional and research team meetings, artifacts, and 25 final self-reflection papers. The data set also included 75 undergraduate cognitive ethnographies, i.e., fieldnotes designed to help students integrate theory, practice, and reflection. Video and audio data were content-logged, coded, and analyzed through multiple analytic memos and represented through data displays (Miles & Huberman, 1994).

By empirically documenting undergraduates’ common sense notions about teaching, learning and culture, we found that novice teachers’ initial beliefs demonstrated more traditional notions of these concepts. Specifically, teachers exhibited (a) understandings of learning that were refracted through their understandings of teaching as an adult-led enterprise, (b) conceptualizations of culture that were not linked to learning but understood as an unrelated concept, and (c) beliefs that conflated race and culture. In this work, common sense notions were linked to deficit thinking (Valencia, 2011), banking models of education (Freire, 1970) and the Othering of students of color (Deloria, 1999). We also illustrated the way undergraduates, over the course of the semester, reframed their understandings of teaching, learning and culture to conceptualize how to re-mediate or re-organize, learning environments where everyone could be “smart” (Gutiérrez, Hunter, & Arzubiaga, 2009). Through understanding the relationship between learning and culture, students had opportunities to shift static understandings of culture to more dynamic, historically grounded understandings of cultural practices. When culture no longer functioned as the property of minoritized groups but rather as lived experiences, students engaged in sense-making about their own assumptions about race and racialized practices. This study demonstrates the importance of attending to common sense notions and the importance of mediated-reflective practice that has implications for learning sciences, teacher preparation and higher education.

Authors