Pedagogical Weaving and Collective Teaching in a STEAM Storytelling Program

• In Event: Friday Roundtable Session 11:25 am
  In Roundtable Session: Emancipatory Movements Toward Justice and Joy: The Role of Improvisation in Transformational Learning (Table 28)

Abstract

This paper examines the improvisational practice of pedagogical weaving in a STEAM and storytelling program serving Black, Latinx, and Asian American middle school youth in Evanston, Illinois. We elucidate how an intergenerational team of teachers of color comprised of community based educators, artists, undergraduate students, and faculty engaged in collective teaching in ways that cultivated deep noticing and shared improvisation.

Educational thinkers such as Paulo Friere and bell hooks have long discussed the centrality of co-presence, relationality, and spontaneity in humanizing forms of education (Friere, 1978; hooks, 1994). More recently, improvisation has been taken up within research on educational justice, with particular attention to the ways teachers can attune to the complex nuances of student sense-making and practice deep responsiveness (Jackson, 2021; Philip, 2019; Roseberry, et. al., 2015; Zapata et. al., 2019). We build with this work to consider the specific role of pedagogical weaving in collective teaching.

Educators and researchers worked side-by-side to co-design, implement and study learning using collaborative, participatory design research (Erickson, 2012; Bang & Vossoughi, 2016) rooted in a partnership going into its seventh year. Our data set includes: over 1000 pages of co-authored ethnographic field notes, audio-video recordings of 50 days of programming and daily debriefs, student interviews and artifacts. We combine ethnographic, micro-interactional and aesthetic analyses to situate salient moments within broader trajectories of discourse and meaning (McDermott & Raley, 2012; Sharpe, 2019).

Our coding and findings elucidate the multiple ways educators wove in and out of one another’s teaching. While one or two educators often led particular lessons, others would carefully attune and chime in to draw out shades of meaning, or to participate as learners in ways that created openings for educator apprenticeship and student participation. We found that the routine presence of such pedagogical multi-vocality deepened the dimensionalities of thought and feeling available within the setting, particularly in moments when educators wrestled with words and ideas together in ways that modeled the significance of language work to storytelling and worldbuilding (Author, 2014).

We analyze the conditions that supported such improvisational weaving, including how educators collaborated in ways that nurtured relationality and trust. Many team members also shared experiences in “sister spaces” (Espinoza, et. al., 2020) such as a university course that shaped pedagogical weaving in ways that carried over into the summer. We show how such collective teaching nurtured an emergent and dynamic rhythm of educational life where educators and students also wove together. For example: educators routinely re-called and brought forward student ideas across days and weeks. One of our youngest students intervened on a final lesson to share his ideas in ways that resonated (in form and substance) with the weaving practiced throughout the summer. Similarly, student interviews reflect a keen noticing of the love and care expressed across educators, which several students identified as the roots of deep community within the setting. We conclude by considering what it means for improvisation to be “shared,” and how investing in such collective teaching holds deep potential for teacher learning and educational transformation.

Authors

• Shirin Vossoughi, Northwestern University

• Melita Morales, School of the Art Institute of Chicago

• Mya Franklin, Northwestern University

• Sam Carroll, Northwestern University

• Onam Lansana, Northwestern University

• Teyona James-Harris, Northwestern University

• Djamila Oumarou, Northwestern University