Designing for Epistemic Heterogeneity and Communal Autonomy: Toward the Political and Ethical in Teacher Learning

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

Abstract

Recent work in the learning sciences has highlighted the importance of designing for ethical and political forms of relationality (Philip, Bang, & Jackson, 2017). In the fields of teacher learning and teacher education, these frameworks and conceptions have sought to re-imagine the current technocratic regime that has undermined not only the development of teachers’ pedagogical imagination (Dominguez, 2019), but has relegated indigenous and everyday cultural practices to the margins of society. As design-based researchers and teacher educators, our work involves supporting the learning and development of teachers as learning scientists, adhering to ethical and political commitments. Here, we draw on Escobar’s (2017) notion of the pluriverse as a “world where many worlds fit” to animate the design of ethical, expansive, and transformative forms of teacher learning. Our work aims to provide teachers with opportunities to jointly imagine and bring into being new systems that privilege epistemic heterogeneity (Rosebery et al, 2010) and communal autonomy (Escobar, 2017; Bang & Vossoughi, 2016).
We present three analytical cases (Yin, 2003) from our individual design-based work with novice and practicing teachers. We draw on the notion of designing for the pluriverse to examine how teachers learn to (1) create new concepts that concern expansive forms of learning and the necessity of heterogeneity, (2) foster new relations between learners and theorize about pedagogical design and, (3) appropriate pedagogical and reflective tools that foster “creative autonomy, social equity, and well-being, including collective control over energy and work” (Escobar, 2017, p.9). Each case privileges one of the aforementioned concepts, drawing substantive connections to others where appropriate. We describe in brief the context of the cases that comprise our multi-sited study of ethical design and teacher learning.
The first case is grounded in a course on decolonial pedagogical innovation, afrofuturism, and making/tinkering. Students were asked to analyze informal spaces of “learning and creation”. Findings speak to the ethical significance of teachers growing to “see” and design from the premise that rich forms of learning and making are always present. Case two examines how political and ethical views of learning emerged for teachers and coaches during a course in Foundations of Computational Thinking. Findings revealed that teachers moved beyond recognizing the utility of new technological tools toward valuing their own place in theorizing about learning and teaching with technology. Finally, we examine one teacher’s learning as a response to contradictions emerging from competing demands from his school and teacher education course. Findings suggest that course tools, including video-based analyses of classroom instruction, can be leveraged by teachers to support school administrators in seeing the resources that non-dominant youth bring to the classroom.
The design of teacher learning environments often delimit opportunities for teachers to engage in iterative cycles of reflection. This study offers methodological and theoretical openings for examining and designing for ethical and political forms of teacher learning that leverage teachers’ agency in broader learning ecologies.

Authors

• Arturo Cortez, University of California - Davis

• Natalie R. Davis, University of Michigan

• Paula K. Hooper, Northwestern University