Leveraging Youths' Everyday Practices: Toward the Ethical and Political in a Preservice Teacher Learning Ecology

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

Abstract

Today’s youth, particularly youth from nondominant communities, are rarely engaged in robust, equitable, and consequential learning activity in schools (Gutiérrez, 2008; Gutiérrez & Jurow, 2016). A central challenge to the field of teacher education is how to prepare teachers to address the range of issues that would ensure a just and worthy educational experience for their students. Specifically, pre-service teachers are not provided the opportunity to (1) develop deep understandings of consequential and robust forms of learning and the importance of leveraging students’ repertoires of practice in learning activity and (2) design for such learning in their classrooms.

To address these concerns, this study explores how participating teachers leverage newly appropriated theories and practices in the construction of emergent forms of transformative praxis. Here the analytical focus is on how pre-service teachers generate local theories of practice—that is, examined models/assumptions— that help guide their teaching in the context of inquiry in this designed teacher learning ecology. I conjecture that (1) providing teachers opportunities to reflect on their own practices and generate local theories about what they see and observe will support them in developing deeper understandings of learning and how to design for learning and (2) attending analytically to teachers’ processes of generating local theories of practice will make visible how teachers come to see how learning in school becomes bounded or encapsulated from the broader repertoires of non-dominant youths.

In this Social Design Experiment (Gutiérrez & Vossoughi, 2010), data draw on the learning and development of 5 novice teachers enrolled in a teacher education course at a university in San Francisco, California. In particular, the study centralizes their systematic reflection over the course of several months as they co-design learning environments with youth.

Video and audio data were collected of activities in the teacher education classroom, as well as novice teachers’ field notes, written assignments, and semi-structured interviews. Video and audio sources were logged and interviews were transcribed. All data was inductively coded (Bogdan & Biklen, 1997). Units of analysis included teachers’ collective and individual sensemaking of pedagogical practices that leveraged, expanded, and amplified youths’ socio-spatial practices (Author, 2019).

This study illuminated distinct patterns for how teachers appropriated the tools from a teacher education course in their reflections on practice. Teacher learning, in this ecology, was mediated by the introduction of new theories of learning, tools that supported mediated praxis, as well as critical discourse analysis of audio- and video-recordings of their interactions with youth. In particular, the tools from the teacher education classroom supported teachers in developing expansive understandings about how to combine the everyday with the academic in the design of consequential learning, specifically with respect to classroom discursive practices.

The study contributes to scholarship that centralizes design-based approaches to teacher learning. In particular, I build on previous work (Philip, Bang, & Jackson, 2017) that foregrounds the political and ethical dimensions of learning by highlighting how teachers appropriate pedagogical tools to support the development of their own pedagogical imagination as they design for new futures (Gutiérrez, 2008).

Author

• Arturo Cortez, University of Colorado - Boulder