Collaborative Evolution of Justice-Centered Teaching and Teacher Education

• In Event: Critical Collaborative Inquiry as Repair and Renewal: Teachers and Teacher Educators Co-Constructing Justice-Centered Education

Abstract

As a team of teacher educators and researchers, we are engaged in an ongoing effort to advance justice-centered teacher education by shaping and reshaping the conditions of our work through ongoing collaborative inquiry with each other and with our students. Resisting a menu of what knowledge and practices teachers need to master in order to become effective teachers, the uncertainty of an inquiry stance (Cochran-Smith and Lytle, 2009) becomes essential to how we understand equity work in schools. For experienced and inexperienced teachers alike, this stance, and the practices associated with it, become essential to pushing back against certainty as a feature of hegemony and the dehumanization of teachers, students, and the profession (hooks, 2003; Love, 2019).
In this presentation, we share our efforts to make ongoing collaborative inquiry with each other and with our students strategic and systematic, establishing a foundational ethos of connection and critical care (Carter Andrews et al., 2021). Drawing from a wide array of liberatory traditions including racial literacy, abolitionist teaching and organizing, anti-poverty movements, critical research traditions, humanizing pedagogies as well as teacher action research and practitioner inquiry, we begin with an overview of how we have been studying, theorizing, and trying to live our work as teacher educators as a process of ongoing redirection toward more just arrangements in education and by building the necessary coalitions needed for justice-centered work.
We then offer a window into one data source – student portfolios – as a site of ongoing inquiry into the ways that teacher education can cultivate justice-centered reflective practice and position teachers as producers of critical knowledge generators empowered to make classrooms sites of humanization and connection (Ayers, 2004). We offer insights into how we equip and support teachers with a stance and the associated tools to engage in rigorous and systemic practitioner research in the portfolio. We also share our evolving process of learning from the portfolios, using them as a data source to study our practice and to engage in the ongoing design and re-design of a justice-centered teacher education program that is responsive to our students and the field. We make a case for how this data source offers a fertile context for students and teacher educators alike to generate critical knowledge about teaching, engage in ongoing formative assessment of our work, and remain accountable to one another in our efforts to advance justice in education.
We close by arguing that the evolution of our justice-centered teacher education program is advanced by the interconnections among our practitioner inquiry as teacher educators and the inquiries of teachers. Through the collaborative relational dynamic of shared inquiry into practice, we become able to cultivate shared commitments and hopeful beliefs about the collective power and capacity of our minds, hearts, and imaginations to solve complex problems of educational practice and to advance equity and social change. We argue that this kind of collaborative evolution must span K-12 and post-secondary education in order to support justice-centered efforts to repair and renew schools and systems of education.

Authors

• Jessica Whitelaw, University of Pennsylvania

• Charlotte E Jacobs, University of Pennsylvania

• Sonia M. Rosen, University of Pennsylvania

• Michael Kokozos, University of Pennsylvania

• Frances OC Rust, University of Pennsylvania

• Vinay Mallikaarjun, University of Pennsylvania