Gwen and Sally: A Tale of Two Theories of Teaching and the World

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

Abstract

Despite student outcomes, success, and general well-being being linked to the dispositions and relational work of teachers (e.g., Grossman, Hammerness & McDonald; Milner, 2012), dominant models of teacher knowledge and learning (e.g. Grossman, 1990; Schulman, 1986; Darling Hammond, 2006) render invisible who teachers are and their political and ethical commitments to teaching, learning, and society. This framing can present teaching as a “neutral” effort that requires understanding disciplinary content, ways of teaching it, and the context and the students, without centering the lives, histories, and political clarity (Beaubouef-LaFontant, 1999) of teachers. By contrast, culturally relevant and responsive teaching views learning not as psychologized notions of knowledge acquisition but as students’ and teacher’s community participations/histories and their relational positionalities vis a vis forms of knowledge (e.g. disciplinary knowledge) and the world (Gay, 2010; Ladson Billings, 1995).

Distinct from universalist or radically individuated notions, CRP approaches are rooted in historicity, relationality, and identity and represent teacher knowledge and learning in tight relationship with theories of learning and society (Philip, 2019) that value the heterogeneity and situatedness of human activity and experience. For example, culturally relevant and responsive teachers recognize that schooling in the U.S. has always served the paradoxical purposes of assimilation or social reproduction and access or opportunity (Apple, 2017). They understand teaching as either working to support the needs and desires of the oppressors or of the oppressed (Freire, 1998). Teaching, in this view, is a cultural, relational, and political activity designed to reduce education debt (Ladson-Billings, 2006) and facilitate the intellectual thriving and sociopolitical consciousness of youth.

In this poster, I distill the epistemological foundations of CRP from dominant models and examine how they get articulated in educators’ visions of professional practice and enacted through their day to day work as teachers. Using a comparative case study approach (Bartlett & Vavrus, 2018), I use interview and observational data to juxtapose how two teachers articulate their knowledge and learning and engage in the work of teaching. Sally Adams is a 30-something 6th grade teacher in a self-contained classroom in an urban public school who identifies as white woman, an immigrant, and as growing up as someone without “a lot of money.” Gwen Marshall is a teacher and founder of a Black independent elementary school. Gwen identifies as a 50-something Black woman, the daughter of “an early feminist”, and as someone who grew up and remains middle class. For Sally and Gwen, data includes a series of interviews about their teaching and classroom observations across two academic years.

Gwen and Sally offer contrasting cases of epistemological innovations in teaching and learning as conceptualized by teachers and enacted through their practice. This analysis evidences the pivotal role that teacher's identities and epistemologies play in shaping teacher knowledge, learning, and practice and what these mean for the learning and positioning of racially minoritized students. Moreover, these analyses may offer conceptual insights into an alternate logic of teaching away from one of compliance, standardization, and assimilation towards those of resistance, adaptation, possibility, and transformation.

Author

• Maxine McKinney de Royston, University of Wisconsin - Madison