An Art-Mediated Instrumental Approach in Change Laboratory Interventions to Motivate Preservice Bilingual Teachers’ Personal Theorizing

• In Event: Addressing Persistent Inequities in Education Through Cultural Historical Research

Abstract

Purpose
Preparing bilingual teachers can assist in providing equitable learning opportunities for language-minoritized students in educational systems. This study aimed to integrate the traditionally overlooked knowledge and epistemologies of bilingual preservice teachers into teacher preparation programs. To do so, we conducted a change laboratory (CL) intervention (Virkkunen & Newnham, 2013) with an art-mediated (i.e., Play-Doh) instrumental approach to enable participants to express their voices in multimodal ways.

Theoretical Framework
The study took place in one U.S. graduate-level practicum seminar course. It was grounded in the instrumental approach of Verillon and Rabardel (1995) to implementing CL sessions via social imagination that promotes art mediation (Greene, 2000). By applying Rabardel’s (2001) notion of instrumentality to student-teachers’ imaginative work with PlayDoh, the study describes how the art-mediated instrumental approach empowered preservice teachers’ professional agency (Engeström & Sannino, 2021) and enabled them to co-reflect on personal theorizing (Ross et al., 1993).

Methods
This qualitative case study (cf., Merriam & Tisdell, 2016) examined how participants used Play-Doh to express their curriculum ideas, classroom (re)configurations, and teaching philosophy. To illustrate the conceptualized premises, data from one CL session of the Play-Doh activity were employed across three cohorts. For this study, we used Play-Doh as the art-mediated instrument for the CL sessions to facilitate the expansive learning actions of bilingual student teachers for modeling new solutions. Play-Doh meets the goals of serving both as artifact and mediation for participants in a pedagogical sense.

Data Sources
We employed narrative analysis (Josselson & Hammock, 2021) to analyze the data. The authors consisted of an intergenerational mentor-mentees triad at AERA 2023’s Cultural-Historical Research SIG pre-conference mentoring session. The first author (Mentee 1) collected the data and co-analyzed them with Mentee 2 and the Mentor. Through the collaborative analyses, participants’ self-generated accounts were further investigated. During the CL session, participants were asked to photograph their Play-Doh creations and describe why they thought their “sculpture” was the best situation/environment for bilingual teaching and learning.

Results
All participants willingly engaged in the CL sessions. They benefited from this art mediation in multiple ways: Play-Doh was used to motivate participants’ personal theorizing to (1) co-reflect on their bilingual teaching philosophy in visual forms and (2) co-create an imagined bilingual learning environment through which they could facilitate students’ development. Figure 1 presents the example of Shelly’s (pseudonym) group of preservice bilingual teachers’ personal theorizing through Play-Doh creation, which explained it as a classroom being an ecosystem in which all parts work together. The group members related with “bees” who facilitated learning by pollinating the flower. The CL participants expressed their aspirations of being multicultural advocates, community collaborators, and innovative facilitators.

Scholarly Significance
The Play-Doh activity invited preservice teachers to imagine their ideal bilingual learning environment and construct their teaching philosophy using their social imagination to co-reflect their personal theorizing. Such co-reflections allowed them to express their untapped knowledge and future aspirations. Art-mediated expressions are instrumental in facilitating co-reflective thinking that helps articulate bilingual teaching philosophy, first in narrative/visual forms and then in future-oriented actions.

Authors

• Sharon Chang, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Monica Lemos, Colégio Rio Branco

• Artin Goncu, University of Illinois at Chicago