The presence of an Invisible College in the knowledge network of ISATT

• In Event: Invisible Colleges: Small Group Spaces for Growth, Inquiry, Healing, and Repair

Abstract

I realised that we[researchers] were talking different things under the word “equity” (an ISATT project section coordinator)
Background: The onset of COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020 provided the founding motivation for the International Study Association on Teachers and Teaching (ISATT) project with a group of 29 members, who were all teacher educators, trying to gain a sense of the destabilizing experience they were going through in their intertwined personal and professional lives.
Purpose: This presentation tells the story of how this crisis became the springboard for knowledge production accompanied by the growth of the participants. The metaphor of “invisible college” (Crane, 1972) helps capture this small, informally-knit international community of interacting educators who met regularly in virtual space to co-construct knowledge in dialogue (Bakhtin, 1981) away from the shadow of academia which determines “truth-by-authority” leaving little room to question this authority (Invisible College, n.d.).
Perspective: Using a cultural historical perspective (Vygotsky, 1978) on learning and human development, this collaborative study viewed the group as the source of development, where the participants, as partners in coalition, learned from one another how each one was responding from their quarantined space to the crisis and coping with challenges. The learning in this “collective zone of proximal development (ZPD)” (Mahn & John-Steiner, 2002) stimulated the invention of new possibilities for just and meaningful practice.
Method: Teacher educators from 29 diverse contexts spanning five continents contributed to the study in a double role—as participants providing data and as researchers analyzing the data. Data were pooled by participants in two phases between 2020 and 2022 through written narratives of critical incidents and semi-structured zoom interviews. All the data from the interview transcriptions and written narratives were uploaded to a google drive for sharing and collective thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2013) through virtual participation and discussion over a year.
Findings: In terms of knowledge production, the findings contributed to the shaping of a new educational narrative that foregrounded the importance of studying pedagogical relationality and wellbeing as aspects of social justice putting ‘Maslow before Bloom’ (Doucet et al., 2020). In terms of personal growth, the online ISATT community as educators’ invisible college was a liberating space helping them leverage the overturning of the institutional norms and its “regimes of truth” (Foucault, 1980/2014) during the pandemic to examine what education for equity and social justice meant from their diverse sociocultural and historical locations and reconceptualize it from their mutual learning.

Significance: The study highlights the role of an invisible college in facilitating an epistemological shift in the sociological process of producing knowledge by creating a legitimate place for the plurality of international educators’ voices and their lived experiences. This gains significance in the present challenging times in academia that researchers find themselves in, where who one can and cannot work with for knowledge production is mandated politically. Invisible college provides a non-political third space for continuing international collaboration of knowledge networks in the face of increasing global and political polarization.

Authors

• Tara Ratnam, Independent Researcher

• Melissa Newberry, Brigham Young University

• Gabriela Jonas-Ahrend, Paderborn University