Centering Care in the Classroom: Approaching Authentic Problems of Practice With Secondary Education Teacher Candidates

• In Event: Revisioning Care in the Pursuit of Educational Equity

Abstract

Purpose
In 2023, we have seen the purposeful and repeated targeting of teachers, teacher educators, and students working within public school contexts across the United States - curriculum bans, threats of firing teachers, and legislation seeking to ban the inclusion of marginalized identities and stories in classrooms. One critical piece to combat assaults on inclusive public schools is the purposeful creation of spaces for future teachers to grapple with and debate authentic Problems of Practice (PoPs) related to education. In this work, we centered the idea of caring as we created sessions focused on PoPs within a large public single-subject teacher education program.

Perspectives
In this work, we used Walker and Gleaves (2016) the caring higher education teacher framework to purposefully guide our instruction and the spaces we created for students. Specifically, we were guided by the four components of the caring higher education teacher: (a) relationship at the center, (b) compelled to care; (c) caring as resistance, and (d) caring as less than. These aspects were modeled in our classrooms in hopes that students would take on these characteristics as future teachers. They also guided the design and implementation of each course session.

Methods & Data Sources
Drawing on design-based methodology (DBR), we elicited feedback from current students around how to design the three afternoon sessions and create a space for authentic inquiry into their PoPs. The three afternoon sessions focused on PoPs acted as interventions for teaching our teacher candidates about how to center care in their practice. Each teacher candidate had a chance to present, to their peers, a PoP that they each experienced in their student teaching placements, and then received insights and perspectives from one another. We collected data in the forms of audio recordings of teacher candidate dialogue, written communication between Teacher Candidates (TCs) on PoPs, and records of the design decisions we made for our classes.

Results
The three sessions provided spaces for TCs to deprogram deficit-oriented thinking as they presented problems of practice to their peers. For example, one student presented the PoP, “How do I keep problem students engaged?” This led to conversations that centered caring and helped TCs consider student labeling and deficit-oriented thinking. TCs referenced the over-labeling of Latino/a/x and Black students as “problem students,” and also helped one another consider how to reframe the PoP. By the end, the conversation which had started in a deficit-oriented framework had evolved to a conversation on how and why students are labeled, and how to build positive and affirming relationships with disengaged students.

Scholarly Significance
This work contributes to the development of a theory related to the higher education teacher. We believe that this work demonstrates that there is a possible transfer of caring and related dispositions to TCs through the three instructors’ modeling and course design. In addition, this work contributes to the scholarship on the centering of care in teacher education settings by demonstrating the link between PoPs and establishing and extending care.

Authors

• William Toledo, California State University - Fullerton

• Kira LeeKeenan, California State University - Fullerton

• Gavin Tierney, California State University - Fullerton