63.011 - Non-Linear Perspectives on Teacher Learning and Practice Across the Professional Continuum

Session Type: Invited Speaker Session

Abstract

Although dominant perspectives in education tend to perpetuate reductionist and linear narratives of how teachers learn and “transfer” that learning into practice, many scholars argue that this work is instead situated, relational, and highly mediated. Thus, the connection between what teachers learn in their preservice programs or professional development activities and what eventually happens in their classrooms does not have a one-to-one correspondence, but is complex and non-linear. Others have even suggested that teaching cannot be reduced to the actions of an individual teacher, but rather, is jointly constructed from a multiplicity of simultaneously interacting factors, including the teacher herself (for whom her preservice or in-service learning is one factor in her own multiplicity), her students, the content to be taught, the physical space and resources available, the school culture and climate, the leadership of the school, and so on.
To resist and interrupt the linear views of teaching that still dominate the U.S.—and increasingly, global—educational agenda, research is needed that can help university and school-based teacher educators, and other stakeholders, think differently about preparing teachers for, and supporting them within, an increasingly complex educational landscape. In this symposia, we argue that doing so requires researchers to “put to work” theories grounded in a very different type of logic—one that breaks with normalized rationalist or commonsense perspectives that undergird oppressive status quos, and instead offers critical conceptual tools to understand and analyze the complex, inter-related, mobile, dynamic nature of teaching and learning. Of particular interest for preparing and supporting teachers to meet the needs of increasingly linguistically and culturally diverse populations, these complex, non-linear theories provide an affirmative perspective to mediate harmful divisions of difference (by religion, ethnicity, culture, language, gender/sexuality, and so on).

Sub Unit

• AERA Presidential Session

Chair

• Kathryn J. Strom, California State University - East Bay

Participants

• Kathryn J. Strom, California State University - East Bay

• Kara Mitchell Viesca, University of Nebraska - Lincoln

• Tammy Mills, University of Maine

• Mariama Gray, California State University - East Bay

• Brandon Sherman, Indiana University - IUPUI

• Linda Whalen Abrams, Knowles Teacher Initiative