Exploring Freirean Culture Circles as a Pedagogical Space for Preparing Equity-Minded Teacher Educators

• In Event: 41.044 - Developing Practices to Recognize and Address the Political and Ideological Aspects of Educators' Everyday Work

Abstract

Objectives/Purpose: Facing unprecedented scrutiny in the last several years, teacher education is undergoing considerable pressure to improve. Despite teacher educators’ central role in this improvement, discussions about teacher education reform largely overlook teacher educator preparation and learning. This paper enriches the scant literature on teacher educators’ development by offering findings from a three-year study of teacher educators’ learning through their participation in “Culture Circles,” an informal learning context inspired by Freire’s (1970) critical cycle (theme generation, problem posing, dialoguing, problem solving, and action) and Boalian (1979) dramaturgy, or teatro. The paper illustrates how participation in Culture Circles facilitated teacher educators’ capacities to identify, reflect on, articulate, and imagine/rehearse responses to ideological conflicts that emerged in their work with pre-service and practicing urban teachers.

Theoretical Framework: The complementary theoretical lenses of critical pedagogy (Freire, 1970; Souto-Manning 2010), and socio-cultural learning theory (Cole & Engeström, 1997; Vygotsky, 1978) grounded the study. Our analysis centralizes the political nature of teaching and teacher education, and education’s potential to disrupt social injustice. Foregrounding the social, cultural, and historical contexts of teacher educators’ work and preparation, our analysis additionally considers Culture Circles’ potential as “contexts of criticism,” where participants might “analyze critically and systemically their current activity and its inner contradictions” (Engeström, 1991, p. 254).

Data/Methods: We used qualitative methods to address the question: How does participation in Culture Circles contribute to teacher educators’ understandings about preparing and supporting pre-service and practicing teachers to serve marginalized youth in urban schools? Culture Circles were convened monthly over three years with sessions lasting approximately three hours. Participants (n=15) included university teacher educators, district officials, school administrators, teacher leaders, and doctoral students. Data sources included documentation of Culture Circle sessions, such as videos, ethnographic field notes, participants’ written reflections, audio-recorded and transcribed participant interviews, and artifacts of student work shared by participants.

Results/Conclusions: Data suggest Culture Circles established multiple “spaces” wherein participants engaged in praxis, particularly around ideological contradictions and their practical instantiations. In the first space, participants’ dialogue supported recognition of and reflection on conflicts between participants’ (i.e., teacher educators) concepts of equity and learners’ (i.e., pre-service or practicing teachers) actions or words, which seemed to manifest opposing ideologies (e.g., deficit perspectives). The use of teatro, as a rehearsal of future possible action, was a second space, wherein participants explored multiple perspectives and expanded repertoires of practice by experimenting with new ‘scripts’ for confronting ideological contradictions. Finally, Culture Circles afforded a space for the re-interrogation, reinforcement, and further development of those repertoires.

Significance: Ambiguity persists around the preparation of teacher educators, especially for work with diverse populations (Goodwin, et al, 2014). This paper offers insights regarding teacher educators’ development by underscoring how Culture Circles as a praxis-revealing activity (Boal, 1979; Freire, 1970) can support teacher educators’ development of equity stances and competencies, which are vital a) to the emergence of equity-oriented ideologies among teachers serving historically marginalized youth, and b) for challenging the technical conceptions of teacher learning and teacher educators’ work that currently dominate the reform discourse.

Authors

• Jamy Stillman, University of Colorado - Boulder

• John Luciano Beltramo, Regis University