Theorizing the Political and Ethical Dimensions of Teacher Learning Across Distinct Cases

• In Event: Attending to the Political and Ethical Dimensions of Teacher Learning

Abstract

This paper seeks to advance a theory of the political and ethical dimensions of teacher learning through a collective case study (Stake, 2006) of four separate instrumental cases (Stake, 1995). Instrumental case studies, as Stake describes, seek to investigate a specific research question; the authors of this paper, who have expertise in teacher education and the learning sciences, sought to study teacher learning in each of their cases as co-constructed by political and ethical processes, both at interactional and societal levels. Looking across four instrumental cases, conducted separately by the authors at distinct sites, the collective case study honors the “closeness […] to real-life situations and its multiple wealth of details” (Flyvbjerg, 2006) while simultaneously allowing for a recursive process of theory building across the cases (Eisenhardt & Graebner, 2007).

The cases in this paper examine teacher learning across a variety of settings: pre-service and in-service; pairs, small groups, and whole class; elementary and high school; English, mathematics, and multidisciplinary. The first case focuses on pre-service teacher learning within a teacher education course designed for novice educators to attend to the political and ethical dimensions of improvisation in teaching. In particular, it examines how a novice teacher navigated her own political commitments, the agency of her students, relationships among students and between students and teachers, and the disciplinary learning in the class. The second case focuses on the ongoing learning of an African American English high school teacher who sought to create a “Black sense of place” (McKittrick, 2004) in her classroom. The case traces how she deliberately approached teaching with the intention of “loving Black students and affirming their brilliance and identities” and teaching all students to love themselves and their communities as “warrior scholars.” The third case is based on a study of a teacher inquiry group of 6 first year elementary school teachers, which was facilitated by the researcher. The case explores the collective humanization of the participants’ students as they attended to the students’ mathematical sense-making. Finally, the fourth case investigated processes of teacher learning through an examination of a pair of pre-service teachers engaged in cognitive ethnographies. It details the novice teachers’ learning about their own agency within the affordances and constraints of their cooperating teachers’ classrooms as they grappled with questions of student relevancy.

By examining the analytical power of constructs that were generated within cases and recursively refining new cross-case constructs, we advance a theory of teacher learning as political and ethical that also attends to the co-emergence of (a) expansive notions of heterogeneous meaning making in the disciplines (Roseberry et al., 2010); (b) relationships in the classroom as pre-figurative (Boggs, 1977); and, (c) the reflexivity of micro-interactions in the classroom and societal-level ideologies and hierarchies of power (Author et al. 2018). In addition to the theoretical contribution, this paper is methodologically significant and we will highlight new insights into conducting collective case studies within the domain of teacher learning, with particular attention to its inherently political and ethical nature.

Authors

• Thomas M. Philip, University of California - Berkeley

• Josephine Pham, University of California - Santa Cruz

• Mallika Scott, California State University - Fullerton

• Arturo Cortez, University of Colorado - Boulder