From Boundary-Crossing to Boundary-Detecting: Teachers’ Sensemaking Role in a Research-Practice Partnership

• In Event: Sunday Roundtable Session 3:05 pm
  In Roundtable Session: Reimagining Teaching Praxis (Table 41)

Abstract

This paper extends the boundary-crossing framework to account for boundary-detection first. Drawing on interview and participant observation data from a two-year ethnographic case study of teachers’ roles and experiences in a civic action research-practice partnership, this paper uses dialogical self theory to understand how teachers encounter boundaries and the social-cultural resources they draw on to navigate these boundaries. This paper shows how teachers’ explanation of their roles and work drew largely from schemas from their past professional experiences. Teachers used these schemas as symbolic resources to detect where boundaries existed. Boundary-crossing as it is currently conceptualized in the literature assumes that actors uniformly recognize boundaries; crossing precedes boundary detection. This paper demonstrates how actors detect boundaries before they cross them.

Author

• Blanca Gamez-Djokic, National Louis University