Teacher Education and Professional Development "in the Wake" of Black Lives Matter: Ontogenic Possibilities

• In Event: Ontologies of Promise: Cultivating Equity

Abstract

Objectives
● To consider the onto-temporal implications of teacher professional development in the “wake” (Sharpe, 2016) of Black Lives Matter (BLM).
● To apprehend teacher professional development not as “giving” teachers that which is already “there” “to be learned, but as ontologically creating learning in the non-linear movements of discontinuous space-time (Kirby, 2011).
● To explore the equity implications of conceptualizing teacher professional development as ontological and temporal “transformations of the entanglement of knowledge and reality.”

Theoretical Framework
This paper draws on posthumanism, which conceives a dispersed image of subjectivity, as opposed to the atomized image of selfhood in traditional Western Enlightenment Humanism (Braidotti, 2013). It also engages emerging literature of the ontological turn in teacher education (Rosiek & Gleason, 2017). Teacher education/professional development (PD) may be understood as acts of “immersive cartography” (Rousell, 2021) that map possible realities as they co-constitute them. The stakes of these ontological productions are ethical to the core.

Modes of inquiry
This paper takes “post qualitative inquiry,” (St. Pierre, 2020) as its primary orientation. St. Pierre states: “the first commitment in post qualitative inquiry is to refuse any pre-existing research methodology” (2020, p. 2). While this may sound radical to some, this is no flippant dismissal of method. It is, instead, an acknowledgement that “nature itself is movement and change” (Rabinow, 2003, p. 73), and that therefore, no prescriptivism has the power to capture a reality that is “out there,” that it does not itself participate fundamentally in creating.

Data, objects
This paper also resists the notion that data is a “thing” “out there” (ontologically) to be “discovered” by knowledge (epistemology). Lisa Mazzei (2010) considers what it would mean, via Deleuze, to “think without an image.” (p. 513). Thus, this paper cannot operate from the ground of a pre-established image of what data is. Instead, it attempts to “convulse” reality (Mazzei, 2010, p. 513), or to participate in the movement of BLM vis à vis teacher professional development.

Results/conclusions
Teacher learning as conceptualized in post qualitative inquiry thus creates different spatio-temporalities. As such, it enacts ontological, ethical creative power. When something new becomes possible, this “something new” need not—perhaps must not—be conceptualized in progressive, linear time, as cause and effect become entangled and co-constitutive (Barad, 2003, 2007). Considering the ongoing “wake” of BLM during 2020, teacher PD might be conceptualized as a kind of speculative “emergent strategy” (Brown, 2017) that unsettles ontological sedimentations of what and how anti-racist teacher professional development might become.

Scholarly significance:
This work contributes to teacher professional development literature of the ontological turn as it conceptualizes teacher PD as constituting sites of onto-ethico-“response-ability” (Springgay et al., 2020) to social justice. Via ontologically relational “response-ability,” teacher education may constitute different actual space-times where greater freedom and response-ability to equity become possible.

Author

• MaryJohn R. Adkins-Cartee, University of Oregon