Ambitious Teacher Education: Supporting Preservice Teachers' Acquiring Linguistically and Racially Just Science Teaching Discourses (Poster 3)

• In Event: Attending to the Crevasse Between Equity- and Content-Oriented Goals in Science Teaching and Learning

Abstract

Purposes. Scholars and teacher educators have stated the need to use a culturally responsive pedagogy within Teacher Education Programs (TEP), to decenter Whiteness (Sleeter, 2017, Varghese et al., 2021) and attend to the increasingly diverse K-12 landscape (Blank, 2010; Huss-Keller & Brown, 2007). In this paper we examine the transformation of a science methods course focused on Ambitious Science Teaching (Windschitl et al., 2018) within an elementary linguistically and racially-just TEP. We examine how teacher educators attend and reflect on Cochran-Smith (2008)’s key learning questions about how teachers learn to teach diverse students, and the teacher educator pedagogies that make this learning possible. This work points to the varying ways modeling (Russell, 2005), as part of engaging in culturally sustaining pedagogies and practices (Paris & Alim, 2017), result in teacher educators supporting TCs in their discourses and on the construction of identity-affirming scientific sensemaking practices for all.

Perspectives. Drawing on notions of raciolinguicized subjectivity (Daniels & Varghese, 2020) that states that race and language are mutually constitutive in forming teacher identity, this work looks at teacher preparation classroom interactions between White and BIPOC teacher educators and White and BIPOC teacher candidates. Using discourse analysis, as a theoretical window to make visible how modeling linguistically and racially-just discursive teaching practices in science allowed, Teacher Educators (TEs) and Teacher Candidates (TCs), to further develop communicative moves for meaning making that show either alignment or discord across speakers (Goodwin & Kyratzis, 2011). That is through the complex relationship between teacher educators and more diverse TCs, we see how collectively they all positioned themselves as linguistically and culturally responsive educators and expanded their discursive practices in Science.

Methods and Data. This paper examines a year's worth of ethnographic observation of the communicative repertoires of three (two White and one BIPOC) teacher educators in a TEP across two Science Methods courses. The analysis included moment-to moment interactions between TEs and TCs captured by videos, observations and interviews (Merriam, 2009). Micro-interactions were examined for moments where teacher educators and TCs aligned themselves with one another and away from reflecting ideologies of language and race upholding whiteness. Discourse analytic methods were used to further analyze TEs and TCs utterances during these moments to highlight their individual identities, collective learning and agency.

Results. Findings revealed that teacher educators’ modeling linguistic and culturally responsive discursive practices in Science unpacked their own raciolinguiziced subjectivity (Daniels & Varghese, 2020) supporting the flourishing of TCs and their accessing their unique intersectional identities in science. This discursive landscape supported them and TCs reclaiming home or acquiring new linguistic and cultural discourses and identities in the context of Science.

Significance. Importantly, this work provides TEPs with a lens to 1) view the co-construction of discursive linguistically and racially just K-12 pedagogies, 2) examine the positioning of TE to attend to culturally and linguistically ways of being and 3) engage the teacher education community in dialogue about leveraging teacher educators and TCs knowledge, practices, experiences and skills for more robust understanding of scientific sensemaking and humanizing pedagogies.

Authors

• Patricia E. Venegas-Weber, University of Washington
  Presenting Author

• Jessica J. Thompson, University of Washington
  Presenting Author