Centering Satisfaction as Integral to Learning with and through New Curriculum (Poster 5)

• In Event: Centering Affect and Emotion Toward Justice and Dignity in Science Education

Abstract

Objectives
The deprofessionalization of teaching has led to a system in which teachers’ knowledge can be conflated with the ability to correctly use district-approved teaching practices and curricula (Others and Author, 2022). Professional Learning (PL) for teachers, even many university-designed Professional Learning Communities (PLC), do not attend to teachers’ social-emotional responses to their teaching and learning contexts as well as the assets they bring to those contexts. This is in stark contrast with increasing attention to these self-same aspects of student learning (Davis & Bellocchi, 2018). This qualitative study explores what happens —what teachers experience and consider—in a (PLC) community designed around foregrounding their satisfaction in teaching a new science curriculum. 1) How do teachers respond to PL that centers their sense of satisfaction and 2) How do teachers describe the potential impact of this focus on their teaching?

Perspectives
This study takes as given that teachers inhabit the historically inscribed social worlds of science teaching, while simultaneously participating in the production of their own selves as science teachers (Holland & Lave, 2019). Thus, we see development of expertise as reinforced by emotional investment in culturally-sanctioned practice (Holland, et al., 2019)--i.e., in their science teaching.

Data Sources & Methods
Five teachers took part in a PL community designed by the first author to both center their individual satisfaction and to support their learning with and about a new curriculum. Data are transcripts of dialogue from monthly PLs over 1 year. PLC transcripts were coded inductively for broad themes. We then used n-vivo coding and constant comparison to develop broad categories for turns of talk.

Findings
Preliminary analyses suggest that the teachers experienced the focus on their satisfaction as extremely novel. For instance, Pat stated “I don’t think a principal’s ever said that. I don’t think…the goal isn’t to be satisfied. Right? The goal is that [students] gain X number of points. And in reading, right?”. Further, some teachers experienced attention to their satisfaction in PL as dignifying, such as Katrina who stated “Yeah, I think you assumed that every teacher has particular strengths, and they really, and teachers feel really good when they know they’re being a strong teacher, and they’re building on their own strengths, right?”

Significance
This paper forwards affirmation of the dignity of teaching and the teaching profession by centering teachers' individual and human need for satisfying emotionality as part of the locally, culturally sanctioned, identity of science teacher. It concludes with implications for the design of PL opportunities that foreground teacher satisfaction.

Authors

• Emily Adah Miller, University of Georgia

• Leema G. Berland, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Ella Yonai, University of Georgia