Teachers of Color Social and Freedom Dreaming for Powerful Learning Ecologies

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

Abstract

Through interactional analysis of video recorded data from a three year social design experiment with, and alongside teachers of color working in Northern California urban and suburban contexts, this paper explores how play, imagination and dreaming can support productive teacher change. Our purpose in this paper is to lean into a specific interaction where play and social and freedom dreaming were encouraged, in order for teachers of color to engage in dialogue and consensus in building a school where they belonged and their collective students of color would belong and thrive.

In an effort to re-mediate (Gutierrez, et al, 2009) teacher learning, we draw on cultural historical perspectives on play that consider how children engage in activities while drawing on a range of tools that bolster learning. Play is treated as a powerful way to engage children in learning mediated by socially and culturally mediated rules. We take this notion of play, to activate the imagination of teachers as they use play to dream about and imagine a different and transformative future for their students. Algonside play, we take up Gutierrez’(2008) notion of social dreaming, which brings together our “historical and immediate past, the present, and the imagined future through...a collective dream for a better world” (p. 158). We believe social dreaming aligns with Love’s (2019) notion of “freedom dreaming” where dreams are neither limited nor constructed on liberal notions of equity and justice. Rather, freedom dreaming, “gives teachers a collective space to methodically tear down the educational survivor complex and collectively rebuild a school system that truly loves all children and sees schools as childrens’ homeplaces, where students are encouraged to give this world hell” (p. 102).

This paper focuses on data from a three-year social design experiment (Gutiérrez & Jurrow, 2016) involving eleven teachers of color who were recruited from a cohort of teacher candidates at an elite private university.These teachers subsequently participated in a summer institute and six inquiry groups during their first year in the classroom.

We engaged in participant observation and documented these encounters with teachers via fieldnotes and video-recording. All video-recordings were transcribed and, along with fieldnotes, subsequently coded inductively for emergent themes.

Teachers engaged in social and freedom dreaming both limited by their racialized experiences as teachers of color and their intersecting identities and being bolstered by their collective dreams for their students of color. This tension proved powerful through the creation of a traditional “school” structure that was also different based on the range of tools included to mediate the best learning outcomes for students of color.

The results of this study are important in capturing the role of play for teachers in imagining what is possible in their classrooms “the very next day” only by having them dream about learning capacities for their students that have no policy or practical limitations.

Authors

• Silvia Tovar, University of California - Davis

• Danny C. Martinez, University of California - Davis

• Elizabeth Castro, Central Washington University