Discourse Practices that Support Redistribution of Power in the Co-Design of Teacher Adaptive Professional Development

• 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

Purpose. Co-design has been recognized as a promising approach for supporting researcher-teacher equitable collaboration and fostering instructional change (Penuel, et al., 2007; Phillip et al., 2022). In our work, we co-designed professional development with teachers and principals to adapt learning experiences to local contexts and meet improvement goals. However, few studies have explored how researcher-teacher interactions and discursive practices may elevate educator voices or reproduce traditional power hierarchies. We contribute to this research by examining discourse in co-design meetings in two schools.
Theoretical Framework. Emerging research on research-practice partnerships (RPPs) has identified generative discourse practices, including future-planning, sharing alternative perspectives, and building consensus, to understand how RPPs can progress and learn (Zala-Mezo & Datnow, 2024). Yet, negotiating shared work can be challenging (Denner et al., 2019; Farrell et al., 2019), and more must be understood regarding how power dynamics play out in practice.
Methods and data. Data include transcripts from video recordings of 30 1-hour instructional improvement team meetings across two years. Meetings occurred within the context of an RPP aimed at reducing inequalities in elementary students’ opportunities to learn mathematics. Meetings focused on co-designing staff meetings for professional learning at two schools. Each school team included university researchers, PD facilitators, teachers, and principals. By examining discourse across two teams driven by the same goals and composed of the same university researchers but different educators at each school, we aim to highlight the dynamic nature of co-design discourse and discursive moves that allowed researchers to be responsive to practice partners as interactions unfolded.
The initial round of analysis began with coding conversational turns for generative discourse (Zala-Mezo & Datnow, 2024). Then, analytic memos explored how moments of generative discourse supported the negotiation of ideas among stakeholder groups and reflected a redistribution of power.
Results. Researchers exercised power by setting the agenda and creating slides for the co-design meetings. However, throughout meetings, researchers routinely created opportunities for school partners to voice their perspectives. As meetings unfolded, conversations and subsequent decisions for structuring staff meetings differed at each school, reflecting practice partners’ agency and adaptations to each context. As an illustrative case, Table 2 provides examples of how a co-design meeting centering professional learning around classroom discourse unfolded differently at each school. At School B, teachers exercised their agency by sharing concerns about the participation of one grade-level team. This led to suggestions for alternative support separate from goals researchers had for the staff meeting, including the principal co-teaching lessons with teachers and researchers supporting lesson planning. At School A, the conversation focused on coming to consensus on shared definitions of classroom discourse. The principal and teachers exercised agency by (re)defining classroom discourse to align with other school-level work and incorporate support for emergent bilingual learners.

Significance. Findings suggest that analyzing discourse in co-design meetings can reveal subtle ways researchers and school-based partners share power to make progress toward joint goals. Leveraging these findings contributes to understanding how traditional hierarchies can be disrupted to ensure equitable collaborations.

Authors

• Rossella Santagata, University of California - Irvine

• Christina Kimmerling, University of California - Irvine

• Patricia Fuentes Acevedo, University of California - Irvine

• Taryn M. Williams, University of California - Irvine

• Aakriti Bisht, University of California - Irvine

• Adriana Villavicencio, New York University