Data for What: Conceptualizing an Ethic of Care Around Teacher Education Data

• In Event: Teacher and Leadership Educators of Color as Wounded Healers: Disrupting Dehumanization in Educator Preparation Programs

Abstract

There is an unstated, common sense, make-believe common purpose driven by educational policy reform efforts that really shapes how teachers are pressured to understand limited forms of data, and how to move forward with using this information (Kumashiro, 2013). This becomes the context in which educators serving students of color find themselves—their value as teachers is based on ahistoric and hegemonic models of education. From a Freirean perspective, the ways in which the predominant landscape of education thinks of educational program performance is dehumanizing. The utility of teacher program performance data as a metric for success can work to dehumanize both teacher educators and the students who they serve. Ultimately, benchmark assessments, screening and diagnostic tests, and various standardized measurements to assess credential student needs and progress tends to target novice BIPOC teachers and teachers in low-performing schools.

State policy makers issue a set of decisions, funding choices, and policies, which are then imposed onto teacher preparation programs that actually have to implement those on the ground with credential students and pre-service teachers, and there is a clear mismatch and disconnect taking place on multiple, intersecting levels. There is often a cultural, social, and racial mismatch between who is defining data, who is being asked to implement decisions based on data, and who is most impacted by those decisions. The results of these layers of mismatch are any number of problems that we see in teacher preparation programs, schools, and districts across the country.

This paper contends that institutional approaches used for collecting, analyzing, and storying data engenders social, emotional, cognitive and mental distress, thus reproducing socially toxic environments where BIPOC teacher educators with intersectional, multiply-marginalized identities are harmed. Combining aspects of anti-colonial theory (Smith, 1999; Tuck & Yang, 2012), community responsive pedagogy (Tintiangco-Cubales & Duncan-Andrade, 2021), and politicized ethic of care (Lane, 2018; McArthur & Lane, 2019), we examine organizational cultural norms and standards that reify white supremacy culture around data collection for teacher preparatory programs. Centering teacher educator critical wisdom, we conceptualize the utility of an ‘ethic of care’ as a foundational, humanizing approach. Critical qualitative data analysis from a university teacher program in a West Coast state, including policy discourse analysis and extensive in-depth interviews with faculty, administration, students, and staff was conducted to deeply assess stakeholder experience with program performance data. The author utilized an inductive data analysis and interpretation strategy that is rooted in grounded theory (Strauss & Corbin, 1990); reviewed the interview transcripts and other documents to identify themes that emerged from the data and categories for coding. The author also submitted these findings to tests of validity, such as member-checking and triangulation. (Lincoln & Guba, 2000; Stake, 1995). Findings suggest that for critically conscious teacher educators to help their students and themselves thrive through hegemonic structures in teacher education requires a complex commitment to providing critically caring systems that help stakeholders move, in beautifully contested ways, to enacting a more humanizing teacher preparation experience.

Author

• Charlotte Achieng Evensen, Chapman University
  Presenting Author