Educator Learning and Mutual Becoming in a STEAM and Storytelling Program

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Saturday 7:45 am - Gold 3
  In Roundtable Session: Engaging in Arts and Making as Acts of Transformative Identity Building

Abstract

Objectives
This paper examines educator learning and mutual becoming in a longstanding STEAM and Storytelling program for Black, Latinx/e and Asian/South Asian middle schoolers. We ask: What conditions support learning across an intergenerational collective of educators of color? How do educators describe the identity shifts and forms of mutual becoming they experience over time? Here mutual becoming refers to moments when student and educator learning are dynamically interrelated and mutually generative.

Perspectives
Research has identified key conditions that support teachers’ professional learning and efficacy (e.g., communities of practice, guidance around equitable pedagogies, instructional materials designed for teacher learning [Patton & Parker, 2017; Wei, et. al., 2010]). Yet there is a need to better understand the paradigmatic identity shifts and forms of political-ethical becoming that can emerge for educators in settings that reimagine disciplinary domains and social relations, and practice expansive forms of arts and political education. Here we draw on Author et al’s (2021) definition of political-ethical becoming as “not only reorganizing our thoughts but reshaping our relations,” and Rogoff’s (2023) fractals as attuning to mutually constituting processes at smaller and larger scales over time.

Methods
Utilizing interpretive ethnography (Erickson, 1985) and participatory design research (Authors, 2016) we report on a data set documenting student and educator learning within a 6-week summer STEAM/Storytelling program over eight years through audio-video recordings, field notes, student and educator interviews, and documentation of co-design processes. We share findings developed through qualitative coding and memoing of pre- and post-program educator interviews, analysis of one focal educators’ trajectory across years, and field notes that capture mutual becoming through educators’ reflections on key interactions with students. Our analytic approach involves working closely with educators (ages 13-62) who blend the role of educators, artists, and researchers.

Results & Significance
Participants describe both structural and relational conditions of educator learning as consequential to the identity shifts they experience. Structural conditions include intergenerational apprenticeship, daily debriefs and educator reflections, opportunities to witness and try out others’ pedagogical moves, and fieldnote writing. Relational conditions include intentional community building and care among educators, encouragement to show up as their full selves, and a culture of playful communion that aligned with the forms of artistic creation supported among students. Patterns across field notes and educators’ pre- and post-interviews reveal the ways educator learning involved embodying the artistic ways of being supported with students (e.g. taking our imaginations seriously, embracing the process of creation and learning), and, crucially, practicing these ways of being in relationships and contexts outside the learning environment, with family and friends. We found that all educator interviews narrated this type of “rippling out” of learning as a key indicator of the identity shifts supported by transformative projects.

Such findings can support intentional design of the conditions that cultivate transformative educator learning. Further, mutual becoming both troubles student-teacher binaries common within oppressive educational structures (Freire, 1996), and helps theorize identity shifts in ways that carefully attune to the centrality of relationality and creativity in human learning.

Authors

• Teyona James-Harris, Northwestern University

• Shirin Vossoughi, Northwestern University

• Lulu Madise, McGaw YMCA