Learning to Teach for Equity: Toward a Complex Explanatory Theory

• In Event: 34.058 - Seeing Patterns in the Kaleidoscope: Understanding Learning to Teach for Equity

Abstract

Problem/Significance
Many scholars have concluded that teacher education research needs to take a complex view, resist simplification, and account more fully for teacher education's contexts and processes as well as its impact on teacher candidates’ and school students’ learning (e.g., Cochran-Smith & Villegas, 2016; Grossman & McDonald, 2008). This conceptual paper offers ideas toward a complex explanatory theory of learning to teach for equity during the preservice period.

Theoretical Frameworks/Related Literature/Mode of Inquiry
Building on Opfer and Pedder’s (2011) complexity analysis of teacher learning, we developed a research framework for studying teacher education for equity (Author, 2014a, 2014b). Labeled “CT-CR,” the framework integrates ideas from complexity theory (CT) applied to education (Davis & Sumara, 1997, 2006) with work linking complexity theory with critical realism (CR) (Byrne & Callaghan, 2014; Walby, 2007) to account for the complexity of teaching, learning, and inequality as well as how teacher learning occurs under varying conditions. Informed by the CT-CR framework, the team’s portfolio of studies asked questions about both what actually happens in an equity-centered program by analyzing emerging patterns of practice and how it happens by identifying conditions that prompted the emergence of practice. These studies reflect critical realism’s stages of development of explanatory models, which begin with complex but concrete descriptions of a phenomenon, then proceed to “theoretical redescription” (Danermark, Ekstrom, Jakobsen, & Karlsson, 1997).

Conclusions/Contributions
Given space limitations, we summarize four theoretical tenets regarding teacher candidates’ learning to teach for equity. (1) Candidates’ learning to teach for equity emerges at the intersection of multi-level complex systems: (a) individual candidates regarded as complex learning systems; (b) preparation programs understood as complex systems of coursework/fieldwork that overlap with certain aspects of schools as complex systems within disadvantaged and other contexts; (c) complex learning communities made up of experienced teachers, candidates, former candidates, and teacher educators; and, (d) larger policy/political contexts characterized by multiple intersecting systems of inequality based on class, race/ethnicity, culture, gender, and language (Walby, 2007). (2) Each complex system is comprised of the interactions, intricate feedback loops, and non-linear relationships of its component parts (Byrne, 1998; Cilliers, 1998), which means that similar candidates and program arrangements do not necessarily lead to similar outcomes, and similar outcomes are not necessarily the result of similar candidates and arrangements. (3) Given (1) and (2), it is futile to seek either the specific program techniques and processes or the specific characteristics of candidates that “cause” effective teaching for equity. (4) However, we can identify Byrne and Callaghan’s (2014) “complex contingent causal mechanisms” or, similarly, Davis and Sumara’s (2006) “conditions for emergence” that support candidates’ learning. These include: redundance of principles and opportunities across programs/schools to interrogate (in)equity and (in)equality; participation in community and other experiences that cause disequilibrium or dissonance related to colorblind, deficit, and/or meritocratic views about educational access and individual success; and, ongoing opportunities to reflect on, reconsider, and redress school/societal practices that reproduce inequity, including candidates’ own complicity and agency in these. The paper concludes with implications for theory and practice.

Authors

• Marilyn Cochran-Smith, Boston College

• Mary F. Hill, University of Auckland