Figured World of Teacher Learning During the Pandemic

• In Event: Critical Pedagogies of the Fifth Dimension: Designing Intergenerational Learning Ecologies During COVID-19

Abstract

This study draws on Holland, et al’s (1998) discussion of identity and agency development within figured worlds. They describe figured worlds as “a socially and culturally constructed realm of interpretation in which particular characters and actors are recognized, significance is assigned to certain acts, and particular outcomes are valued over others” (p. 52). We examine how in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, this ecology can be seen as a simplified world, populated by agents (course instructors, field supervisors, pre-service teachers, and youth) engaging in a range of meaningful activities (teaching, learning, debriefing, planning, working with youth, maintaining flexible dispositions, making/tinkering, 3D printing and online video games such as Roblox and Among Us). We further examine how these activities are moved by a specific set of forces such as teaching appointments, university program requirements, and the mandatory practicum component. In this context, student teachers gradually recognize and develop their multifaceted identities—cultural, racial, linguistic, queer and national—in relation to other actors in the figured world they work with.

The participants include 9 novice teachers from diverse cultural, linguistic, and socioeconomic backgrounds, as well as majors including elementary education, psychology, speech learning and hearing sciences. The participants also included 2 instructors, one of them a woman identifying international scholar from a non-dominant part of the world in the doctoral program and the other a Latinx queer tenure-track faculty, and 3 field supervisors, two of them are queer and one is female identifying, all young scholars along different trajectories in their doctoral programs. To answer our research questions, we relied on participant observations of the instructors in class and field supervisors in the practicum, as well as artifacts produced by novice teachers in class, such as field notes, digital dialogue journals, and discussion posts, wherein they draw on their practicum experiences to relate to the content. The study also draws from 80 hours of classroom hybrid/in-person instruction video data (recorded from zoom sessions) and 18 hours of interviews.

Findings illuminate that in the context of this teacher learning ecology teachers imagined possible futures for themselves and their communities, using their identities, histories and experiences as catalysts. The analyses allowed us to view novice teachers as positioned to enter imaginary worlds and model possibilities side by side (Paradise & Rogoff, 2009) with youth. These imaginaries fostered new actions in shorter timescales in the work with youth, that may have effects on identity formation in longer timescales (Lemke, 2000) and become part of their repertoires of practice (Gutiérrez & Rogoff, 2003) for novice teachers in the pre-service training program.

This study will have implications in understanding how identity formation occurs for novice teachers who engage in a figured world of teacher learning during a pandemic that forces the actors in the figured world to pivot and imagine possibilities to create authentic and meaningful digitally mediated learning.

Author

• Ishita Pradhan, University of Colorado - Boulder
  Presenting Author