Facilitation Practices for Expanding and Disrupting Teachers' Noticing for Equity

• In Event: Theorizing Teachers' Situated Talk to Disrupt Inequitable Instructional Practice

Abstract

Objectives
It is widely accepted that professional learning communities provide contexts for teacher learning and improvement in practice. As partnership models become more widely adopted to disrupt and transform educational systems for equity and justice (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016), new questions emerge about whether and how these contexts become generative spaces for teacher learning. This is particularly important when these partnerships include members whose positionality invoke issues of power that can make it challenging to engage with new ideas, perspectives, practices, and identities. In this paper, we focus on how facilitators of professional development navigated conversations to provoked tensions that have potential to be generative for expanding and disrupting teachers’ noticing for equity.

Theoretical perspective
We draw on participatory design that identifies tensions as sites for learning and transformation (Engestrom, 1999). Tensions emerge as collaborators from different communities narrate values, commitments and perspectives in co-design activities (Bang et al., 2015) and can become sites for transformation. Research on professional development also finds that conversations that invoke differnet perspectives are productive for teacher learning (Author, 2020a; Dobie & Anderson, 2015). Though the literature identifies practices for orchestrating productive discussions that can provoke teacher learning (Author, 2014; Coles, 2019), little is known about how facilators navigate conversations that are responsive to tensions that arise in professional learning discourse.

Methods and Data Sources
Data for this study consisted of video recordings and transcripts of professional development meetings from a program aimed to support secondary teachers’ noticing for equity, along with recordings of facilitators planning for and reflecting on PD meetings. We reduced the data to moments when leaders identified tensions that emerged in conversations. Informed by research on facilitation practices (Authors, 2014; Coles, 2019) and discourse analytic methods (Duranti, 2001), we analyzed how facilitators enacted practices during discussions that centered tensions to become generative sites for teacher learning.

Findings
We identified two emergent practices facilitators enacted when they sought to navigate discussions that reified tensions in relation to rehumanizing mathematics instruction. First, they enacted the practice of acknowledging teachers’ professionalism that served to maintain norms of politeness and disrupt deficit discourses about teachers. One facilitator remarked, “We need to treat them with the same approach we do our students… meet them where they are so they can learn and grow.” At the same time, the facilitators also enacted the practice of positioning teachers as learners. This practice entailed fostering teachers awareness of the dominant narratives that shape mathematics instruction and how they inform their interpretation of classroom interactions through cycles of observation and inquiry. In the full paper, we elaborate these practices and examine how facilitators coordinated them to navigate discussions that elicit tensions.

Significance
These findings contribute to calls for research to deepen extant notions of community that honors teachers’ professionalism while simultaneously engages with difference for growth (Peele-Eady & Moje, 2020). Specifically, we elaborate research on facilitation to theorize practices that can invoke productive discourse for transforming teachers’ noticing to rehumanize mathematics instruction.

Authors

• Elizabeth A. van Es, University of California - Irvine
  Presenting Author

• Alison K. Munzer, University of California - Los Angeles
  Presenting Author

• Ethan Rubin, University of California - Irvine
  Non-Presenting Author

• Jose Angel Mendez, University of California - Irvine
  Non-Presenting Author