Teacher Learning Communities as Fraught Spaces

• In Event: Collaborative Approaches to Noticing for Anti-Oppressive Mathematics Education

Abstract

Objectives
Exploring social arrangements for teacher learning necessarily point to the importance of community, or how people come together over time and across space to create new practices and take on new identities. Often, the focus of a teacher learning community is on trust, mutual engagement, and shared goals towards progress on a predefined trajectory. However, social arrangements for teacher learning that involve stakeholders with diverse perspectives, or work across lines of power, may need to be conceptualized differently. This paper describes the patterns of participation in a community-based approach to teacher learning that seeks to illuminate nuance in the nature of the ‘community’ that emerged.

Theoretical Framework
The notion of community as constitutive of learning has been widely accepted and theorized in educational research (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Horn and Little, 2010). Peele-Eady and Moje (2020) posited that extant notions of community must be deepened to honor their complicated nature, and to center diversity over homogeneity. They argue that as contexts for learning, communities are “purposeful gatherings of people, who embrace and exploit difference to achieve new learning” (p. 231). Vakil et al (XX) propose that community members aim to develop politicized trust by making power structures and individual self-interests visible in the work.

Methods
Data for this study comprised semi-structured interviews with members of the community of learners, including teachers, community leaders and researchers — aimed at developing a heuristic for teachers’ noticing for equity. The interviews were conducted at the end of the project, and lasted 45 minutes to 1.5 hours. Data was open-coded and themes emerged around multidimensionality, trust, diversity and instability.

Results
We found that to fully recognize our community, it was necessary to embrace both the cohesion built on politicized trust and relationships, and the ways in which it was a fraught space, for different members, and at different times. By attending to issues of power, we saw the fractals of inequities (Paguyo & Iturbe-LaGrave, 2021) mirror social structures in the community, which facilitated and hindered a sense of cohesion. For example, Justin, a Black male community leader, described how there were, “multiple communities at multiple times”, and that participation in an aspect of the community work, for example, in a racial affinity group, might complicate participation in the whole community. Anna, a white teacher, expressed that it was “never the community for me” and that it “kept falling apart and trying to be back together.” Anna also described the reason she persisted included relationships and her curiosity. Through interrogation of where participants felt a sense of community, we document the complexities and nuance in the plurality of community.

Scholarly significance
Communities are not homogenous, nor are its members. As the data illustrate, they are much more unstable, imbued with power, and when unexamined, might render a community more stable than it is.

Authors

• Elizabeth Mendoza, University of California - Irvine

• Michelle Frierson, Utah State Universtiy

• Victoria M. Hand, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Justin Ten Eyck