Toward a Poetics of Attunement in Educator Learning

• In Event: Storywork as a Generative Model for Educator Attunement and Learning Toward Justice and Well-Being

Abstract

In this paper we explore how we might design storywork experiences that nurture educators’ interpretive power (Rosebery, Warren & Tucker-Raymond, 2016) through close, collective attention to intersections of equity and heterogeneity in disciplinary learning intertwined with poetic attunements to language in moment-to-moment learning and teaching. Our original theorization of interpretive power centered educator learning on attention to a) students’ heterogeneous sense-making repertoires as intellectually generative in disciplinary learning, and b) pedagogical practices that expand the onto-epistemic boundaries of disciplinary learning in ways that hold the complexity and multiplicity of possible, rather than singular, meanings, perspectives and values (Bang et al., 2012; Mignolo, 2007; Warren et al., 2020). Here we explore an expansion of interpretive power that attends to language as a collective, ethically laden act of poetic attunement to the possibilities offered in moment-to-moment learning and teaching. We ask: What are the relational conditions that invite and nurture poetry and possibility, understood as a relational ontology (i.e., living imagination as a way of life) different from that which conventionally dominates classroom life by suppressing the rights of historically minoritized children and communities to educational dignity and well-being?

To do this, we put into conversation varied engagements with a lived classroom story (“Magic Beans”; Warren & Rosebery, 2011) and juxtapose these to a) draw out the specific sensibilities and attunements toward language, disciplines, pedagogical practices, and children’s sense-making that were animated across these varied engagements, and b) propose an expanded concept of interpretive power that re-imagines the world in the mode of a radical poetics of learning and teaching. Using interpretive methods, we examine how “Magic Beans” is taken up—variously retold and reworked—in four distinct contexts, including teacher-researcher collaborations, undergraduate and graduate education courses, and intergenerational educator learning spaces. Each was committed to exploring approaches to educator learning centered in practices of collective attention to children’s and teachers’ sense-making, with some overlapping and some distinct frameworks and artifacts—readings, images, protocols—to mediate collective activity.

In engagements framed through a lens of interpretive power, mediated by theorizations of settled expectations regarding racial, linguistic and cultural hierarchies (e.g., Harris, 1993), collective interpretive activity highlighted children’s ideas, how they expanded the discipline and reshaped powered boundaries of meaning, and the pedagogical work supporting those expansions. In engagements framed through a lens of poetics, mediated by poetry and essays (e.g., Anzaldúa, 1987; Smith, 2018; Trethewey, 2011), collective interpretive activity grew into a space for practicing imagination as a way of life, with specific attunements to words and their possibilities, movements of feeling, and qualities of listening and responding in the moment. In looking closely within and across these engagements, we attend not only to what participants are struck by but to the grounding sensibilities and attunements they bring to their collective interpretive activity. By attending to the practices of word-work (Morrison, 1993) that emerge in these collective interpretive practices, our goal is to begin to particularly name and design for the possibilities they open in making new educational worlds.

Authors

• Beth M. Warren, Boston University

• Ann Rosebery, TERC

• Xi CiCi Yu, Boston University

• Maria C. Olivares, Boston University