Using Video Club to Disrupt Teacher Candidates' Perceptions of Student Understanding and Justice-Oriented Pedagogies

• In Event: The Power and Possibility of Creating and Exploring Critical Mathematics Classroom Teaching Video Cases in Teacher Preparation Programs

Abstract

Many teacher education programs (TEPs) now utilize video clips from teaching to support TCs in noticing and attending to the complexities of student learning (Barnhart & van Es, 2015). Video-based collaborative platforms allow TCs to slow down practice in order to unpack the nature of student discourse alongside the instructional decisions that influence students’ contributions (Authors, 2018a). Video clips also allow TCs to bring authentic K-12 experiences into their TEP. Video clubs (Sherin & Han, 2004) contribute to TCs’ learning, facilitate opportunities for TCs to examine student thinking, instructional moves, and classroom interactions, while providing a context for teacher educators (TEs) to facilitate TCs’ development of a professional vision that centers learning around video-based classroom evidence (Goodwin, 1994).

I refer to justice-oriented pedagogies (JOPs) as pedagogies that disrupt the inequities in schools in order to provide access and opportunities for students, in particular, students who have been historically marginalized. Critical educators cite the importance of JOPs in working toward the elimination of racism and sexism in the classroom (Joseph, Hailu, & Boston, 2017). Video analysis also allows TEs to support TCs to incorporate JOPs into their professional vision by centering students’ identities, assets, and learning needs, while simultaneously pushing against deficit framing. In spite of the need for attention to JOPs (Solórzano & Delgado Bernal, 2001), the field is still in need of empirical examples of their successful implementation in TEPs (Darling-Hammond, 2009).

Data were drawn from an ongoing study that examines what TCs learn from engaging in video club (Sherin & Han, 2004). When asking TCs to select moments of student talk, one of their first tasks is to pay attention to who participates in the academic conversation and how students communicate their understanding. Twenty video club submissions, each three to eight minutes in length, were analyzed for each of four TCs during their final year of their TEP. Data were analyzed for teachers’ attention to JOPs, particularly as outlined by the Teaching Tolerance Standards (Teaching Tolerance, 2016). For example, clips were coded for TCs’ attention to getting to know students, honoring students’ individuality, and building respect in their classrooms, as in accordance with the identity, diversity, and justice anchor standards from the Teaching Tolerance Standards.

Analysis suggests that video provides a means of disrupting what TCs think they know about student learning, offering a more complex and nuanced understanding of classroom complexities. This study found that TCs: (a) identified goals for their personal professional practice that initially focused more on student thinking than justice, but progressed toward JOPs as the year progressed, (b) selected video clips based on not only the content of the video, but also on their comfort with the learning community itself, and (c) offered video clips that attended to issues of equity, diversity, and JOPs when they felt comfortable with their video club learning community (Darling-Hammond, 2009; Louie, 2017; Wager, 2014). This study provides insight into the relationship between developing JOPs and the nature of the learning community.

Author

• Teresa Kathleen Dunleavy, Antioch University - Seattle