Humanizing Research Through Collaboration and Shared Authority

• In Event: Humanizing Research Labs: How Faculty Use Their Labs to Dismantle, Redesign, and Reconstruct Oppressive Systems

Abstract

Knowledge-building flourishes in collaborative contexts where ideas are openly shared by multiple voices and problems are posed and solved together creatively and with mutual regard (Cobb, 1995; Engle et al., 2014). This paper explores an approach to education research organized around curiosity, collaboration and shared authority as key principles for both structuring research and transforming classrooms. Collaborations collectively aim toward the shared goal of transforming classrooms into humanizing contexts that promote students’ mathematics learning and identity formation. Here, collaborations exist: (a) at the Research-Practice level between research and district partners, (b) at the Professional Development level between teachers and teacher educators, and (c) within the research team between faculty and graduate students. These collaborations are dialogic in structure and meant to share authority among participants. Sharing authority includes: (a) centering the perspectives of participants whose roles in a given context carry less power (i.e., centering the ideas, wonderings, and experiences of students in classrooms, teachers in professional development spaces, and graduate students in research discussions), (b) fostering reflective and dialogic discussion among participants, and (c) developing an expansive and asset-focused lens of curiosity in making sense of one another, as well as of teaching and learning processes.
This paper will offer descriptive examples of how multiple collaborations can productively intersect through dialogic activity aimed toward a shared vision of humanizing education. Examples will draw from collaborative activity between the research team and a district math coach (RPP) toward co-creating professional development experiences for teachers, between the district math coach and teachers that inform the RPP collaboration, within the research team toward generating new understandings of elementary mathematics classrooms that also inform the RPP and support the work of teachers, and within classrooms among students making sense of mathematics together. Additionally, we offer examples of how training informed humanizing the process of research for graduate students entering the academic profession. This paper then situates these examples within a post structural perspective to offer a framework for fostering research partnerships that disrupt structural hierarchies to promote mutual recognition and joint thinking aimed at generating practices and understandings of learning and becoming that are expansive, responsive, and build on assets that are regularly discovered and named. We also discuss challenges to this work, emphasizing the need for flexibility, openness, and building trust and safety.

Authors

• Jennifer M. Langer-Osuna, Stanford University

• Rosa Chavez, Texas Tech University

• Faith Kwon, Stanford University

• Jim Malamut, Stanford University

• Kimiko E. Lange, Stanford University

• Jesse Ramirez, Stanford University

• Emma Carene Gargroetzi, University of Texas at Austin