A Critical Collective: Lived Experiences and Teachers' Sense-Making About Discussions of Gender, Sexuality, and Immigration

• In Event: Understanding Teachers as Learners Through Their Collaborative Sense-Making

Abstract

Purpose: Our paper explores how teachers’ participation in Learning Labs (LLs) provided opportunities for collective sensemaking around facilitation of text-based discussions centered on identities and life experiences, including gender, sexual diversity, and immigration. The participating teachers are part of a collaborative school culture and share commitments to inclusive and affirming curriculum and pedagogies. However, they brought varied lived experience, previous professional development, and comfort with taking up discussions about LGBTQ identities and Latinx immigration narratives. We trace the relationships between the structures of LLs as a context of professional development and the kinds of sensemaking teachers engaged.

Perspectives: We view learning as a social process unfolding through shared activity and relationships (e.g., Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1989; Lave & Wenger, 1991). We bring a critical lens toward the problem spaces opened up in collaborative designs for teacher learning, including the complexities of power and positioning in teachers’ processes of engaging with each other, children, and content (Kumashiro, 2013). Our critical sociocultural lenses support us in tracing how these discourse structures represent teachers’ current understandings, as well as in what ways these “problem spaces” influence the reshaping of possible worldviews and perspective (Lewis, Enciso & Moje, 2007).

Methods: We focus on data from two LLs drawn from year one of a multi-year study. LLs are opportunities for teachers to collaborate on planning, enactment, and debriefing of joint teaching experiences in one another’s classrooms. At our site, a K-5 elementary school, participants included 7 teachers(1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 5th grades), 2 student teachers, and 1 learning coach, and 3 university-based collaborators. We focused on data from two LLs, including transcripts and video of interactions in each phase of the LLs, teachers written reflections, artifacts created during the LLs, and teacher interviews. Analysis involved deductive and inductive coding and critical discourse analysis.

Results:
We found tensions and complexities in the group’s collective sensemaking around text-based discussions. For instance, teachers’ interactions positioned these topics as highly politicized, while also providing opportunities for team members to articulate their commitments to including them and tensions some felt based on recent experiences with forms of pushback on content. We show how colleagues drew on prior learning and lived experience to respond to one another with empathy, but in ways that positioned inclusive texts and critical conversations about gender, sexuality, and immigration as necessities, particularly in the current political climate of the US. Teachers also brought their individual sensemaking, including questions and personal goals toward inclusive texts and discussions, into written reflections and individual instruction between LLs.

Significance:
A key goal of our LLs is to (re)position teachers as critics and creators of knowledge about teaching and, in turn, for teachers to collaboratively learn how to design instruction that affirms students’ identities and positively positions them as generators of knowledge (Pandya & Avila, 2014). Our analysis helps to build understandings of how innovative PD designs can support teachers toward entwined pursuits of explicit attention to justice within enriched opportunities for student talk in instruction.

Authors

• Elizabeth Dutro, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Erica Caasi, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Emily Yerkes, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Kirsten Musetti Tivaringe, University of Colorado - Boulder