A Co-Construction of Teacher Learning About and Through Education Activism

• In Event: Teacher Participation and Awareness: Poised for Participatory Work

Abstract

In this participatory action research study, researchers and teachers co-create a professional learning space around histories of educational activism while exploring how processes of co-creation and content interact with participants’ professional learning and identities. Bringing together transformative learning theory, institutional theory, and abolition thinking, findings suggest that collaboratively-created professional development, particularly around topics related to activism, creates spaces where teachers can question the ideas of facilitators and move them towards greater applicability to their contexts, while facilitators can draw out critical understandings of those contexts. Using grounded coding to analyze data, this study illuminates how building processes into teacher professional development more broadly can help unsettle rigid schooling systems and settle educators’ collective resolve to change them for the better.

Authors

• Allyson V. Compton, Iona University

• Anuraag Sensharma, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Jose L. Vilson, Bank Street College of Education