Seeking the Promise of Critical Community Mapping in Teacher Education

• In Event: How Critical Literacies Are Changing in a Post-Pandemic World

Abstract

Multiple calls have been extended to teacher educators to foreground asset-based and humanizing approaches in teacher preparation (Annamma & Winn, 2019; Souto-Manning & Winn, 2019), particularly to counter the perpetuation of racist ideas about students of color and their neighborhoods (Souto-Manning, 2019). These calls increased in the wake of state sanctioned racial violence that accompanied the COVID-19 pandemic. In this paper, we seek to answer these calls by interrogating the use of critical mapping in teacher education.

We suggest teacher education has much to gain from critical and desire-based (Tuck, 2009) community mapping to support teachers in becoming part of the thriving communities in which they wish to serve. Community mapping seeks to draw out the ways people transform the spaces they inhabit into incubators of pleasure and hope amidst ongoing marginalization (Bates et al., 2018; Solnit & Shapiro, 2016). In our previous research (Anonymized, 2019, 2020), we found mapping has the capacity to surface multiple, sometimes conflicting conditions and perspectives of the educational landscapes across a community, including social power distribution and marginalization that otherwise may be erased, overlooked, or discounted.

We report pilot data from two cohorts enrolled in a MEd course on technologies in education between 2021-2023. Educators were majority white women educators in a range of urban and suburban schools with 2-25 years of experience. Educators engaged in a walking learning asset audit (Morrison et al., 2017) of their school neighborhood(s) using GoogleMaps, pin drops, and captioned photos. Teachers reflected-in-motion on learning theories, imagined sites of learning, and assumptions of who can be mentors. They reviewed their initial maps with youth and community members, updating them, adding critical annotations, and posting critical reflections (Gay, 2010). We employed a series of critical discourse analytical tools (Gee, 2014) and visualizing-as-inquiry (Anonymized, 2015) to analyze teachers’ interactive maps and reflections.

Multiple teachers reported never having been to their students’ neighborhoods. Teachers mapped formalized sites of learning (universities, museums, libraries) and sites of learning that replicated didactic forms of instruction such as a monument with a plaque. Teachers gave primacy to existing curriculum framing learning with a neoliberal lens, such as the purpose of connecting to youths’ larger learning ecologies is to “prepare them for future jobs and the ability to become productive members of society.” Teachers’ language also revealed preferences for highly structured civic organization. Only one teacher, a Teacher of Color, directly addressed racial dynamics, with very few white teachers addressing “divides and differences” in vague terms and mostly focusing on economic disparities. Similar to Aronson and colleagues (2020) and Toliver and Hadley (2020), we found white teachers demonstrated avoidance to directly address issues of equity and intersectional marginalization, in particular the role of race and racism in communities and schools.

We conclude with implications for redesigning this experience in seeking to meet the promise of critical mapping to provide direct experience for educators to engage in critical reflection of biases regarding the neighborhoods and communities with whom they wish to partner in the education of youth.

Authors

• Anna Smith, Illinois State University

• Ryan Kerr, Saline Area Schools

• Christopher R. Rogers, Haverford College

• Munchuree Kaosayapandhu, Illinois State University