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Using Narrative Inquiry and Dialectical Pluralism to Support Enacting Dispositions in Urban Teacher Preparation

Tue, April 17, 8:15 to 9:45am, New York Hilton Midtown, Floor: Concourse Level, Concourse B Room

Abstract

Purpose: Our core question addresses how mentors with residents reflect and enact professional dispositions for equity-based teaching using dialectical pluralism and narrative inquiry.

Perspectives: Narrative inquiry (Clandinin & Connelly 2000) helps teachers make sense of their professional worlds and change their teaching practices. Narrative has emerged as both a method in and an object of inquiry in teacher education. Rather than describe phenomena objectively, narratives allow teachers to connect phenomena, reconcile what is known with what is hidden, and reconstruct understandings of themselves and their teaching world. Restorying one’s life potentially empowers a teacher to confront cognitive and emotional dissonance, create new meanings and see new possibilities. However, narrative inquiry is often insufficient to: transcend individual and group conflict; build an asset approach to differences; and navigate systemic obstacles to enacting dispositions.

Dialectical Pluralism (DP) was selected to address narrative inquiry’s insufficiencies. DP is a process philosophy, communication theory, and inquiry metaparadigm to dialog with multiple perspectives (Johnson 2015). DP integrates multiple theoretical concepts, including the works of Rawls, Dewey, and Habermas. Ontologically, DP views reality as plural and changing. Epistemologically, DP includes listening, interacting, and learning from “the other.” DP emphasizes procedural justice through a deliberative democratic process. DP assumptions include: (a) engage with multiple perspectives dialectically, dialogically, hermeneutically, and empirically; (b) no single perspective is perfect or exhaustive; (c) each perspective provides a set of “goods”; (d) different perspectives drive creativity, change, and provide new, improved, wholes.

Methods: Situated in a USDE-funded partnership preparing teacher residents in America’s second largest urban district, the authors are conducting an equal-status mixed methods study of a reflective practice and dispositions assessment system known as RT360. Our inquiry addresses: how RT360 reflects professional disposition development; how resident voice and advocacy were supported by mentors, university faculty, and knowledgeable others; and how effectively residents translate their reflections into action. RT360 is grounded in Dialectical Pluralism and California’s Teaching Performance Expectation #6: Developing as Professional Educator.

Data sources: Each RT360 inquiry cycle involves core stakeholders participating in triangulated reflection using: resident and mentor weekly logs; pre-post and developmental surveys of residents, university faculty, residency coordinator and field-based mentors; RT360 debriefings; peer cohort dialog facilitated by residency coordinator and collaboratively generated action plans.

Results: Our RT360 Framework organizes strategies for individual, communities of practice and systems. These strategies evolve over four phases: 1) design phase to identify baseline needs and ensure critical stakeholders are involved; 2) grow phase to holistically build structural, human and relational capital; 3) enact phase to maintain momentum to achieve win-win solutions, fidelity and sustainability; and 4) evaluate phase to monitor impacts and improve the next cycle.

Significance: While state and national accreditation systems require institutional documentation of dispositional development, there is little research about the pedagogical repertoire of teacher educators to support candidate inquiry and dispositional enactment for equity and social justice. This exploratory equal-status mixed methods study offers some design insights for future efforts.

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