The Emergence of Deficit Thinking: Tensions around Resistance in the Co-Design of Justice-Centered Pedagogy

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Sunday 8:00 am Four Seasons Ballroom 1
  In Roundtable Session: Equity as a Process: Negotiating Tensions and Power Dynamics Through Discourse in Co-Design Meetings (Table 9)

Abstract

Objectives. We report on the first year of a 5-year design-based Research-Practice Partnership focused on supporting teachers to embody antiracist and justice-centered pedagogy. Our work focuses on supporting teacher learning about the ways in which equity and inequity are structured at the micro-level in classroom discourse. We conceptualize instructional moves that shape the intellective opportunities in classroom learning (who gets to speak, what about and in what ways) as site which race and racisms are embodied, but also a potentially powerful site for anti-racist praxis (Freire, 1996; Author, 2015).

In this paper, we focus on tensions that emerged between researchers and practitioners in co-design focused on noticing manifestations of racism in classroom data, and designing lessons that centered and leveraged the brilliance of the minoritized youth in teachers’ classrooms. Deficit thinking (Valencia, 1997) emerged as teachers engaged in sensemaking and the researcher team needed to negotiate these perspectives, the goals of co-design (i.e., justice-centered pedagogy) and the commitment to non-hierarchical research-practice relations.

Conceptual Framework. Our work is guided by the premise that antiracism, as a commitment and a habit of mind, is a developmental (and non-linear) process (Author, et al, 2023), but also a sociocultural one (Omi & Winant, 2014). Thus, the theory of action for teacher professional learning was processual – supporting onto-epistemic transformation through scaffolded noticing and reflection of classroom data and social processes as the manifestation of racial meanings and structures.

Methods. We facilitated a year-long PD with 1 middle and 1 high school group of teachers (N=6). PD focused on noticing for equity, supporting teachers’ sensemaking about racial processes and their manifestation at the macro-level (society), meso-level (schools) and micro-level (their classroom dialogue), and lesson study (designing justice-centered lessons). PD was recorded and transcribed. We used discourse analysis to analyze how deficit thinking emerged in PD and consider how to design for onto-epistemic transformation about youth, their brilliance and capabilities.

Results. The findings indicate that deficit thinking emerged in two situations 1) when teachers are reflecting on the results of pedagogical decisions they have made, and 2) when they are planning future instructional decisions. In the case of the former, teachers were engaged in reflections that failed to meet their own expectations, and in the latter, they predicted that they would not be able to meet a future goal. The findings also indicate that when teachers adopt an inquiry stance to practice, they engaged in imagining alternative courses of action.

Significance. The findings indicate that deficit thinking emerged through face-work (Vedder-Weiss et al, 2019), how teachers were reflexively engaged in positioning themselves and their practice in the co-design process. However, face-preservation work served to reproduce and reify hegemony to the detriment of their brilliant BIPOC students. These findings highlight the delicate intersubjective work of co-design and partnerships. Thus, there is a need to foster “dialectical openings”, which create space and safety to critically interrogate self and reproduction, as well as imagination and a sense of agency to engage in justice-centered practice.

Authors

• Sherice Clarke, University of California - San Diego

• Sushil Shintre, University of California - San Diego

• Katherine Dennis, University of California - San Diego

• Ernesto Orozco, University of California - San Diego