Mapping as Metaphor and Practice in Community-Immersive Teacher Education

• In Event: 66.070 - Connected Learning in Teacher Education

Abstract

Purpose
From where do teachers learn to cultivate and sustain critical connections with a community? While much research about the effectiveness of culturally relevant pedagogies exists, it has yet to formalize into everyday practice within teacher education to embrace an ecological view (Lee, 2008) of the small activities taken up by residents that coalesce into a lively community full of intrigue, dreams, and possibilities. In this paper, we share the work of teacher educators embarking in community mapping as a form of critical connected learning (Ito et al., 2013) for the teachers and communities of color with whom they work.

Perspectives
In communities, such as the Chimurenga collective (Ose, 2014), and disciplines such as urban planning, geography, and learning sciences work in community mapping seeks to draw out the ways youth and adults, transform the spaces they inhabit into incubators of pleasure, hope, and desire amidst ongoing marginalization (Bates et al., 2018; Ribakoff & Coval, 2017; Taylor & Hall, 2013). Teacher education has much to gain from (re)mapping strategies to support teachers in becoming part of the thriving communities in which they wish to serve. Following Solnit and Shapiro (2016) and Corner (1999) we take up mapping not merely as a representational activity, but as a transformational “cultural project, creating and building the world as much as measuring and describing it” (p. 214). As collaborative practice, mapping has the capacity to surface multiple and conflicting conditions and perspectives of the educational landscapes across a community that may otherwise be overlooked or discounted (Author 2, under review). In this sense, the practices of community mapping hold promise to operate as meaning-making incubators of the type youth are already engaged.

Methods
Data were gathered in three rounds. First, video observation, artifact collection, and reflective memos from a Mapping for Critical Connected Learning (Ito et al., 2013) in Teacher Education workshop. Second, a collection of implementation plans with 10 of the teacher educators who had participated in the workshop. Accompanying these were two in-depth, semi-structured interviews: one regarding their intentions for the plans and one during implementation. Future data collection will include collection of teacher and community created maps and interviews with those parties. For analysis, we employed resonance mapping (Stornaiuolo & Hall, 2014) across data type as an interpretive visual analytic (Author 2 & Colleagues, 2015).

Findings & Significance
In our initial findings, (re)mapping activities in teacher education are elucidating links between people, places, and spaces that form the lifeblood of a community. The cerebral work of (re)mapping (Solnit & Shapiro, 2016) is allowing teachers to (re)discover youth lived experience, improvisation, and imagination (Edjabe, 2017) as interest-driven forms of knowledge that can be carried through curriculum and leveraged toward civic, economic, academic, and political opportunities (Ito, et al., 2013). Drawing from research around Rasquache and Black spatial imaginaries (Bedoya, 2014) that take an asset-based approach to communities of color, we recognize the potential for transformative teacher education and pedagogies that flow from being immersed in these ways within the community.

Authors

• Christopher Rogers, University of Pennsylvania

• Anna Smith, Illinois State University