Showcasing an Unexamined Affordance of Video Clubs: How Noticing Positions Teachers for Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy

• In Event: 75.019 - Advancing the Knowledge Base to Improve Teaching: Generating a Design Framework for Video-Based Activity Systems

Abstract

The teacher noticing community has extensively studied how to best support teachers learning to be responsive to students’ disciplinary meaning-making; however, our community is only beginning to consider how to support teachers responsiveness to students’ cultural ways of knowing. The body of theory undergirding noticing student thinking (as a vehicle for teacher learning) has a diversity of affordances, only some of which have been well-articulated by the literature. Just as many have leveraged the affordances of video-based PD (PD) to support teacher noticing for ambitious mathematics and science teaching, these same affordances are available—and should be leveraged—for Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy (CSP) (Paris, 2012).

Purpose: This paper has three aims: one conceptual, one illustrative, and one design-based. First, we develop a conceptual model showing how the theoretical roots related to teacher noticing are closely aligned with theories foundational to CSP. Second, we provide an annotated illustration of a video-club excerpt, demonstrating how this context that fostered teacher noticing had the unintended—but serendipitous—effect of highlighting learners’ cultural ways of knowing. Third, we articulate video-club design features that can promote CSP, while still helping teachers promote rigorous disciplinary meaning-making.

Perspective: “Noticing [is] a practice essential to attending to learners…and to connections between learners and the domain” (Ball, 2011,p.xxi). Learners are, as Mason (2011) suggests, “complex organisms,” whose complexity is honored in environments that eschew simplistic interpretation. Noticing enables observers to hold multiple interpretations at once, as “multiplicity opens possibilities” (p.46). This dynamic characterization of knowledge aligns with Alim and Paris’s description of CSP, which, “seeks to perpetuate and foster… linguistic, literate, and cultural pluralism…position[ing] dynamic cultural dexterity as a necessary good” (2017,p.1).

Methods: In building the conceptual model, we reviewed major works devoted to teacher noticing (Sherin, Jacobs & Philipp, 2011), the teaching frameworks of Ambitious Science Teaching (Windshitl et.al., 2012) and Cognitively Guided Instruction (Carpenter et.al., 1999) (frameworks in which noticing students’ thinking is a key element), and CSP, and developed a schema connecting aligned theories across these frameworks. In developing the annotated illustration, we collectively read a video-club transcript with the intention of understanding how issues related to culture were manifested in a video-club that had an explicit focus on students’ thinking, laying the groundwork for design suggestions for video-clubs to promote CSP.

Results: In the paper, we present a conceptual model of theory undergirding these teaching frameworks and CSP. We include features of PD, derived from our transcript analysis and literature review, that can support teacher noticing across these frameworks. For example, we suggest video-based PD use point-of-view footage focused on students (not the teacher) because it provides visual/audio details of what students say and do—opening up possibilities for what teachers can notice about students’ cultural ways of knowing.

Conclusion: Video-based PD encourages teachers to notice student thinking, make it the centerpiece of instruction in ways that recognize its complexity and honors its multiplicity, and then constructively build from it, rather than position it naïve or incorrect. These essential features can successfully promote CSP.

Authors

• Melissa J. Luna, West Virginia University

• Malayna Bernstein, West Virginia University

• Janet Dawn Kim Walkoe, University of Maryland