Intersecting Voices: Integrating Student Voice Approaches in Teacher Education

• In Event: Student Voice Research Symposium: Theory, Methods, and Innovations From the Field

Abstract

Purpose
This study explores co-research through a project called Teaching and Learning Together (TLT) which constitutes the culminating phase of an approach to teacher education that enacts and advocates for an “intersecting voices” approach (Cook-Sather & Curl, 2016). The vision that informs this work is the co-creation of knowledge that honors the humanity and capacity of variously positioned people as participant-researchers and co-learners: secondary students, school-based educators, college students, and university-based educators. The investigators see such research as a way of life in the Education profession and a mode of being in teacher preparation. This approach prepares college students to be future educators who embrace the fundamental understanding that teacher-student collaboration is the only way that learning meaningfully happens.

Theoretical Framework
The theoretical underpinning of our approach is that student perspectives and voices are essential to analyses and development of teacher and learner identities, teaching and learning approaches, and teacher-student relationships. Investigating TLT from a SVRF, we attend to intersubjectivity, reflexivity, power dynamics, and context.

As a challenge to research that perpetuates power dynamics and oppression (Tuck, 2009), Paris (2010) argues instead for “humanizing research,” defined as “a methodological stance which requires that our inquiries involve dialogic consciousness-raising and the building of relationships of care and dignity for both researchers and participants” (pp. 139-140). Similarly, as part of a project to “decolonize and humanize educational research,” San Pedro and Kinloch (2017, p. 374) articulate a research methodology grounded in dialogic relationship building through storytelling.

The work of “humanizing” through “dialogic consciousness-raising,” “relationship building,” and “storytelling” serves as a foundation for the various forms of research in TLT.

Author

• Chanelle Wilson, Bryn Mawr College
  Presenting Author