Co-Designing Teacher Learning Ecologies Toward the Development of New Pedagogical Imaginations

• In Event: Reimagining Teachers as Critical Mediators and Theorists of Learning Within Complex Political and Ethical Ecologies

Abstract

Teacher learning ecologies tend to deprivilege everyday forms of knowledge, owing to a long history of inequality in schools in which the knowledge and cultural practices of non-dominant people is not made central. At the same time, novice teachers are rarely provided sufficient opportunities to develop deep understandings of consequential and robust forms of learning and the importance of leveraging students’ repertoires of practice in learning activity and to design for such learning in their classrooms. The design of novice teacher learning environments tends to privilege the transmission of a set of core practices that teachers are expected to emulate in their own classrooms, rather than to support teachers in developing a professional vision that foregrounds expansive and transformative forms of learning where youths’ everyday life experiences are fundamental (Philip, 2019). In this design-based study (Gutiérrez, 2018), I argue that teachers can learn to appropriate and leverage theories of cultural-historical learning and development and design for expansive forms of learning and equity, in the context of joint-reflection on their interactions with youth.
Based on a cultural-historical approach (Engeström, 2004) to learning that foregrounds teachers’ agency in identifying and resolving everyday dilemmas, this analysis draws from a semester-long teacher education course designed to support teachers in their sensemaking and the development of pedagogical practices that aimed to combine young people’s everyday cultural practices with academic genres (Gutiérrez, 2008). During the course, novice teachers engaged in mediated praxis (Gutiérrez & Vossoughi, 2010) as they discussed their own classroom interactions and reflections on practice with their peers. The discussions were designed to support teachers in examining the social organization of learning, as well as how course theories animated and historicized their understanding of classroom dilemmas. This analysis focuses on two teachers and their discussions around leveraging young people’s cultural practices. I chose these discussions because they illustrate how teachers collectively name and resolve tensions in their pedagogical practices and conceptual understandings.
Through video-based microanalyses, I explore how the teachers made sense of and leveraged each other’s reflections on classroom practices to create new meanings and heuristics about expansive forms of learning. I also analyze how the two teachers re-imagined their conceptions about the purpose of classroom dialogue, as they drew on tools and ideas made available in the course to centralize the role of equity and the socio-political histories of their students. In particular, they developed a concept called magic circles which describes dialogue that combines youths’ everyday practices with academic genres. This analysis has implications for the study of teacher learning: (1) providing teachers opportunities to reflect on their own practices and generate pedagogical concepts about what they see and observe will support them in developing deeper understandings of learning and design and (2) attending analytically to teachers’ processes of generating new pedagogical concepts will make visible how teachers come to see how learning in school is encapsulated from the broader repertoires of non-dominant youths.

Author

• Arturo Cortez, University of California - Davis