Co-Constructing Critical Sense-Making Discourses About Equity and Justice–Centered Science Instruction in a Responsive Virtual Professional Development

• In Event: Responsiveness in Teacher Education: Insights and Directions for Facilitation

Abstract

Purpose. This study explores co-construction of critical sense-making discourses between researchers and 14 secondary science teachers in a year-long virtual professional development (PD) program. The PD aimed to develop a shared, critical understanding about equity/justice-centered instruction. Two research questions are:
How were teachers’ and the researcher’s experiences and resources from various contexts used for collective sense-making conversation?
How were teachers’ discourses about teaching science for equity and social justice surfaced, challenged, problematized, and expanded over time?

Perspective(s). Drawing upon an ecological framing of teacher PD (Cobb et al., 2003; Ehrenfeld, 2022), we use scope, interconnectedness, and temporality as a framework to explain teacher learning toward justice-centered instruction. Using the lens of scope, teachers’ contextual realities were analyzed at the level of microsystems, mesosystems, exosystems, and macrosystems. The notion of interconnectedness draws our attention to how teacher-learning resources from the ecology were acknowledged, invited, and connected for desirable changes in their discourses. Temporality calls for moving beyond the linear notion of progress; instead understanding how learning in the PD is shaped by different phases in teachers’ learning trajectories as teachers continuously engage in the adaptive cycle of disrupting/problematizing, reorganizing/planning, experimenting and sense-making, and conceptually consolidating/being proficient.

Methods. We employ critical qualitative inquiry (CQI) “to expose and critique the forms of inequality and discrimination that operate in daily life (Garoian & Gaudelius, 2008),” therefore “change the world in ways that resist injustice while celebrating freedom and full, inclusive, participatory democracy” (Denzin, 2017, p. 9).

Data sources and analysis. The data were video-recordings of 7 virtual meetings (a total of 14 hours), artifacts (pre/post surveys, quick writes, teaching artifacts, slides), and interview transcripts (three times). Guided by the framework, the segments where teachers' and researchers’ experiences and resources from other contexts were identified, transcribed, and coded (RQ1). A few selected segments were further coded focusing on teachers’ engagement in adaptive cycle (RQ2). Based on the analysis, we recognize complex progress in teachers’ learning toward equity-centered instruction.

Findings. Through the deliberate and responsive design of PD activities, the participants’ experiences and resources from other contexts were constantly leveraged for collective sense-making (RQ1) in three ways: 1) teachers drew upon pedagogical actions and minoritized students’ responses from their own classrooms to co-construct the meanings of equity/justice-centered instruction with other teachers; 2) used critical languages from the other PD that they attended to, in order to challenge and expand the conversation during the meetings. Researchers used the research data or literature to put minoritized students’ voices and experiences on the table. The analysis revealed different ways in which teachers’ discourses were problematized and expanded while engaging in the adaptive cycle (RQ2). The extent to which teachers’ discourses were challenged and expanded over time depended heavily on professional situations as well as their trajectories.

Scholarly significance of the study. The findings of this study reveal the complexity of supporting teacher learning in response to their lived experiences and resources when putting equity and justice at the center.

Authors

• Hosun Kang, University of California - Irvine
  Presenting Author

• Victoria Nguyen, University of California - Irvine
  Non-Presenting Author