Educating alongside: student identity as a multiplier of challenging and community-engaged learning

• In Event: AER Roundtable Session Friday 1:45 pm - Gold 3
  In Roundtable Session: Imagining a future of belonging and community-centered instruction through high school redesign

Abstract

While the adults in a school drive any change effort, it should be focused on the young people those adults serve. School redesign for better learning means cultivating environments rich in relationships, trust, and welcoming just as much as it means creating learning and assessment experiences that are appropriately challenging (Darling-Hammond, et al., 2024; Berkowitz. Moore, Aster, & Benbenishty, 2016; Wang & Degol, 2016; National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2018). When students experience identity-safe environments, it can activate their capacity to learn and see themselves as capable learners (Hernández & Darling-Hammond, 2022). Supporting educators to create learning experiences that welcome students’ various identities into the classroom as an asset to accessing intellectually challenging material is essential to any school redesign effort.

To create the conditions to imagine, educators must experience identity-safe and rigorous learning experiences firsthand. Teachers’ identities shift over the course of their pre-service and in-service experiences, shaped by both professional and personal experiences (Vermunt, Vrikki, Warwick, & Mercer, 2017; Beijard & Meijer, 2017). Educators who experience the types of active and inquiry-based learning environments that are best for student learning can be well prepared to enact these types of practices in the classroom (Sims & Fletcher-Wood, 2021; Darling-Hammond, Hyler, & Gardner, 2017; Penuel, Gallagher, & Moorthy, 2011). For pre-service educators, this can be especially impactful in setting the foundation for their professional identities. When in-service educators experience powerful learning, it can also change how they see themselves and their priorities as teachers.

When teacher educators create identity-safe learning environments that prioritize relationship development and belonging, they can pave the way for future educators to do the same for their students. Coupled with community-connected learning, wherein students experience their learning as grounded in authentic and relevant local contexts and their futures, learning environments that prioritize student belonging can create the conditions for powerful learning. At the classroom-level, this can impact hundreds of students. When applied at the school level, these learning experiences can be instrumental in bringing about whole-school change and shifting mindsets of educators toward buying into some of the central features of redesign.

In this session, an experienced teacher educator will present artifacts from students for participants to make sense of within the framework of relationship-centered instruction, community-connected learning, student identity-development, and high school redesign. She will share learnings from an analysis of pre-service teacher professional learning and identity development and their impact on pre-service and early in-service teacher lesson and unit development. The artifacts and analysis can help to inform teacher educators and others who support the professional learning of educators in designing learning experiences that are both community-connected and facilitate positive developmental relationships between students and teachers and students and their peers.

Author

• Chela Myesha Delgado, University of California - Berkeley