Unflattening Teacher Education

• In Event: 35.047 - Unpacking Unflattening: Interdisciplinary and Multimodal Inquiry in Teaching and Research

Abstract

The purpose of this presentation is to engage with the concept of unflattening in context with teacher education program design. Specifically, the presentation considers a number of concepts forwarded in Unflattening, such as “threads of association” vis-à-vis Actor Network Theory, and how these concepts both identify some shortcomings of existing teacher education heuristics and initiate more useful heuristic that might account for the dynamic, complex systems that comprise teacher education.
  
This presentation uses Unflattening (the text) and unflattening (the concept) as an umbrella concept for rethinking the nature and design of teacher education. The paper presentation draws from Actor Network Theory (Fenwick & Richard, 2010) and applications of social network and capital theory in teacher education (e.g., Baker-Doyle, 2011, 2015) to theorize threads of association in teacher education programs. This perspective directs attention to institutional forms through which learning takes place in teacher education programs and institutions more broadly. These institutional forms include rhythms, hierarchies, networks, and wholes (Levine, 2015). Importantly, the paper considers these forms as operating not in isolation but in collision with one another, and that learning takes place in the midst of these collisions.   
 
This paper presentation is conceptual in nature. It applies key ideas about knowledge organization, learning, and institutional forms to the enterprise of teacher education. The application considers teacher education writ large but also draws from one specific teacher education program (that author coordinates) and the program’s efforts to “unflatten” teacher education through program redesign. This programmatic unflattening takes place though an understanding of the institutional forms (again: rhythm, network, hierarchy, and whole) that structure student learning through courses, field experiences, and social interactions of various scales.    
 
The significance of this presentation lies in two areas. First, by-way-of Unflattening, the presentation helps conceptualize teacher education as something more than a process-product model where predictable inputs and outputs produce teachers. These models do not account for the complex and dynamic systems in which learning to teach takes place (Cochran-Smith, Ell, Grudnoff, & Aitken, 2014). Second, this presentation affords a useful heuristic by way of colliding institutional forms to consider the space in which teachers learn, develop, and emerge.
 

Author

• Emery Marc Petchauer, Michigan State University