Centering First-Year Teachers of Color: Co-Designed Learning Ecologies as Spaces of Critique and Possibility

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

Abstract

Objectives or purposes
This paper explores the co-design of professional learning ecologies with first-year teachers of color in the San Francisco Bay Area. Drawing on data from a social design experiment that followed pre-service teachers of color from their participation in our teacher education program through their first-year as classroom teachers, we examine the tensions that emerged as we worked to collaboratively design professional learning spaces devoted to further preparing these teachers to navigate issues of language and race in their work teaching racialized multilingual students.

Perspectives or theoretical framework
The paper builds on cultural historical theoretical perspectives (Gutiérrrez & Vossoughi, 2010) to examine how we, as a team of researchers, collaborated with teacher participants to co-design learning ecologies that were intentionally oriented towards centering issues of language and race. In particular, the paper draws on the notion that explicitly addressing emergent contradictions within learning ecologies can serve as a generative starting point for expansive learning.

Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry
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.

Data sources, evidence, objects, or materials
Data sources consist of participant observation fieldnotes and transcripts from six monthly inquiry group meetings and one day-long summer institute.

Results and/or substantiated conclusions or warrants for argument
Analysis of the data reveals the tensions that we, as researchers, navigated as we sought to balance our predetermined focus on language and race with our participants’ most pressing needs and concerns as first-year teachers. These tensions and contradictions were most evident during our monthly check-ins, wherein we consistently erred on the side of holding space for teachers to surface whatever was most pressing for them. While the teachers often addressed issues connected to language and race, our monthly check-in time came to function as an overall space for them to vulnerably and transparently articulate a language of critique (McLaren & Farahmandpur, 2005) related to a wide array of work-related issues. The paper argues that directly addressing and intentionally re-mediating these and other emergent tensions within this learning ecology helped facilitate the collective articulation of a language of possibility (McLaren & Farahmandpur, 2005).

Scientific or scholarly significance of the study
This study contributes to scholarship on innovative practices that facilitate teacher learning related to teaching multilingual students of color. Consistent with this year’s conference theme, this study offers concrete implications for co-constructing educational possibilities by collaboratively co-designing learning ecologies for and with early career teachers of color. Our hope is that this knowledge and its dissemination will assist other teacher educators and future teachers in their efforts to promote educational justice in multilingual educational settings.

Authors

• Rita Kamani-Renedo, Stanford University

• Davíd Morales, Stanford University

• Ramon Antonio Martinez, Stanford University