Machetes, Markets, and Metros: Learning to Teach to Children's Potential for Collaboration and Contribution

• In Event: Centering Justice: The Political and Ethical Commitments in Teaching, Learning, and Learning to Teach

Abstract

Learning to teach should include learning to embody the idea that “differences across human communities” are “both the norm and a necessity” (Lee, 2017, p. x). Recognizing learning as an individual capacity and activity can engender narrow concerns with perceived differences between and among learners (Lave, 1996; Penuel & Shepard, 2016). In this paper, I present a case (Ragin, 1992) of designing a pedagogy to help future teachers consider organizing learning experiences so that children can make contributions to valued activities. I present findings where university students in a course on learning shared how they made meaning from machete stories, which are personal and/or encountered accounts of children seemingly acting above their age (Rogoff, 2003). As the course instructor, I regarded machete stories as tools for future teachers to think with while navigating dilemmas raised in some contexts when tasks are organized so that children are included.

Schooling can be characterized by ranking and sorting in response to difference (Varenne & McDermott, 1999). Yet, when we look at learning outside of school responsibility for knowing things and guiding activity is often shared among those with differences (Rogoff, 1994; Bang, et al, 2015). The accomplishment of broad inclusion does not reside in an individual but rather within a community’s organization (Lave, 2008).

University students, many future teachers, participated in a weekly practicum (set in an elementary school’s after-school program) and a biweekly lecture. Data sources included written reflections and fieldnotes where course participants made sense of experiences across course settings. Ten course members volunteered to take part in semi-structured interviews where they were asked how they made meaning of machete stories. Preliminary analyses indicate that machete stories were a generative tool to talk and notice with. Many students used these stories to articulate how culture shapes which tasks get broadly recognized as suitable (or not) for children. As an instructor, I began with stories of children contributing by using machetes with competence because I assumed doing so would evoke dissonance for many students. However, analyses show that some engaged in a kind of ranking and sorting beyond their initial encounter with a machete story where subsequent stories were judged as being (or not) to the same degree as the original. Doing so is in many ways counter to my pedagogical intent: that the machete would be understood both literally and metaphorically, thus flexibly, so that future teachers might consider a child’s potential for contribution across contexts.

Learning interpersonally and institutionally how the social organization of settings can support others in having “an intensity of purposefulness of participation, beyond simply being present” (Paradise & Rogoff, 2009, p. 104) has the potential to help schools move beyond the sorting and ranking too often seen as schooling’s purpose (Booker, Vossoughi, & Hooper, 2014; Labaree, 1997). Stories of children contributing to valued tasks with competence in ways seemingly above their age have the potential to serve as a pedagogical intervention, one that can support teachers in organizing in the present a future where children are more fully included.

Author

• Quinton Andre Freeman, Independent Scholar