Co-Authorship Aimed at Developing Tools for Activist Views of Teaching-Learning

• In Event: It's Not a Game: Challenging Dominant Narratives Through Counterhegemonic Epistemologies

Abstract

Teacher education encompasses emerging teachers’ quests for their roles in, and contributions to, social practices of teaching-learning. These quests require a toolbox filled with various tools for being-knowing-doing processes, and of agency and self-determination. Teachers are not often considered capable of creating such tools. Involving teachers in co-authoring tools for studying teaching and learning is presented as an agentive approach. Here we consider the potential of co-authoring for teacher development and educational change. In particular we demonstrate, through narrative inquiry, how co-authorship contributes to the processes of (1) changing deficit views of learners and learning and (2) taking an activist, transformative stance to teaching-and-learning. We illustrate how the approach was used to reach equity goals of teachers’ own choosing.

Authors

• Susan A. Kirch, New York University

• Pooneh Sabouri, Florida International University

• Moyu Zhang, New York University

• Wanjing Ma, New York University