Re-Mediating Learning Ecologies for/With Teachers of Color: Tensions and Possibilities Across Teacher Preparation Programs

• In Event: Centering Racialized Teachers: A Proleptic Redesign of Teacher Learning Toward Leveraging Linguistic Diversity

Abstract

This paper reports on emergent findings from a social design experiment (Gutiérrez & Jurrow, 2016) across three teacher education programs, in California and Illinois, co-designed with Pre-service Teachers (PSTs) of color to leverage their experiences and perspectives to explore how to better prepare them for their current and future work in linguistically diverse classrooms. This cross-site paper explores productive tensions emerging for teachers of color in work to reimagine classroom lives by working toward leveraging collective experiential knowledge to mediate powerful learning ecologies.
Our collaborative work engages in re-mediating (Gutierrez, et al, 2009) teacher learning spaces. Rather than treating teachers of color as needing remediation, we intentionally frame the learning environment as being in need of re-mediation and reorganization. Following Gutiérrez et al. (2009), we conceptualize re-mediation as inclusive of the introduction of different tools to support learners. In teacher education, this is critical to support newer teachers who may need additional support as they begin their teaching careers.
This larger social design experiment draws heavily on qualitative methods more generally, to collect data across our sites. Activities include our teacher preparation courses and teacher of color inquiry group meetings facilitated by each author. While there are topical similarities across our sites, contextual factors lead to variance in our activities, dynamics, and outcomes across sites.
For this paper, our findings emerge from observational and video-recorded data that emerged from moments of tension in our work with teachers of color. Across the three sites, our research team conducted an initial survey, ongoing interviews, and observations with our teacher co-designers; documented our own engagement in and reflection on the co-design of these learning experiences; and collected a range of artifacts related to our university teaching and our participants’ K-12 teaching and related learning.
Productive tensions were critical in surfacing specific needs of teacher of color participants. We found that the specific learning ecologies became generative spaces for teachers of color to engage in necessary (and sometimes difficult) conversations about the role of race, racism, language, gender and sexuality in their teaching lives, and the consequences of these intersectional issues for their day-to-day teaching. The uncovering of this finding was a productive tension in and of itself, as it sometimes moved us away from our specific focus on language in our efforts to cultivate a supportive relational space with our teacher of color participants. In various ways, we responded to the tensions that surfaced at each of our sites by re-mediating our respective learning ecologies. Crucially, much of the work of re-mediating these learning ecologies was initiated by the teacher participants themselves, as they sought to take ownership of the space and build community with us and with their peers.
Taken together, the findings from all three sites contribute to ongoing scholarly conversations about teacher preparation and teacher professional learning among teachers of color. Overlapping themes and findings across our three sites offer direct implications for rethinking teacher preparation and early career support for teachers of color.

Authors

• Danny C. Martinez, University of California - Davis

• Ramon Antonio Martinez, Stanford University

• P. Zitlali Morales, University of Illinois at Chicago