Navigating Power-ladened discourses during a PLC focused on multilingual, elementary, science teaching (Poster 8)

• In Event: Research on STEM Professional Learning Communities: Attending to Teacher Learning, Agency, and Equity

Abstract

Objectives. As researchers strive to work toward equity in education, attention to how teachers and teacher educators develop asset-based perspectives and what role power plays in this process has become a focus in teacher education (Carter Andrews et al., 2019; Philip, 2019; Souto-Manning & Martell, 2019). Within science teacher education, researchers have been working toward equity by investigating the role of language within science as one approach to broadening what counts as science and whose ways of being are perceived as scientific (Daniels et al., 2023; Grapin et al., 2023). In this study, I examine how power-laden discourses, which I call institutional Discourses (iDs), appear and move through the discourse of a professional learning community (PLC) of first-year, elementary, multilingual, science teachers working in multilingual settings. The PLC was focused on interdisciplinary approaches to teaching science, language, and literacy for multilingual students.
Perspectives. This work draws on ideas from raciolinguistics, which studies the relationships among language, race, and power to move toward social transformation (Alim, 2016; Flores & Rosa, 2015). Because of language’s relationship to power, critical discourses permeate the work at the intersection of science and language (Wilmes et al., 2018). As research in this area is yet emergent, few empirical examples are available to indicate what supports teacher learning around language and science teaching to disrupt dominant discourses.
Data Sources & Methods. Teachers in this study attended the same critical-leaning teacher education program grounded in an explicit multilingual and social justice stance. They then joined the research project and met monthly through zoom PLCs during the 2021-2022 school year. Through a critical discourse analysis of two sets of interviews and teacher talk during the first year of sessions of their PLC, this study makes visible patterns of how power-laden discourses unfold during teacher learning. Specifically I studied talk in the critical friends’ group (CFG), a structure in which teachers share their quandaries regarding teaching practice, within the PLC. In exploring iDs, the study aims to connect some ways equity can be understood as occurring across multiple layers (micro, meso, and macro) (Burgess & Patterson Williams, 2022).
Results. The data shows three patterns that characterized how various institutional Discourses were developed and wrestled with during the CFGs: Reinscribing of iDs, Broadening of iDs, and Disrupting of iDs. Two significant findings are that Disruption of iDs occurred only in the CFGs with science-and-language foci and that disruption was typically initiated by a facilitator. Additionally, the data showed that teachers saw the PLC as a collaborative space that reminded them of the commitment to social justice that had been instilled in their teacher education program.
Significance. I argue that the predominance of iDs that had originated from the teachers' shared teacher education program during the CFG supported teachers in seeing the PLC as a return to a shared ideological home. Additionally, this study articulates empirically-based mechanisms at the meso level for how asset- and deficit-based perspectives can be produced, reified, or disrupted during teacher learning in a PLC.

Author

• Cristina M. Betancourt, University of Wisconsin - Eau Claire