“Not let [social justice] go”: Ideological homecoming in PLC learning and elementary science justice-centered teaching

• In Event: Reconfiguring teacher learning as joy and connection: Longitudinal pathways for collaboration in justice-centered science instruction

Abstract

Objectives
A perennial question in teacher education remains what teachers learn in their programs (Brouwer & Korthagen, 2005; Cochran-Smith & Villegas, 2016); this is particularly true in regards to teachers’ understanding and enactment of justice-centered teaching (Reagan & Hambacher, 2021; Zeichner, 2018). One of many challenges in studying this question is the absence of longitudinal studies of teacher learning, especially in the context of elementary science teaching. Through teachers’ participation in a continual professional learning community (PLC) from their Master's in Teaching program to their fifth year of teaching, the main objective of this study was to understand what of salience was articulated by teachers in terms of justice-centered science instruction.

Theoretical Framework
This study uses the Bakhtinian framework of ideological becoming (Freedman & Ball, 2004), or the development of one’s view of the world and belief system, in seeing how individual teacher change “must be understood within the context of collective rearticulation within a social space where ideology is constantly contested” (Philip, 2011 p. 326). Discourse provides a window into ideologies (Van Dijk, 2013) and, as such, this study focuses on using discourse (Gee, 2005) to understand teachers' ideological becoming about justice-centered instruction. In attempting to understand this, we acknowledge the complexity inherent in teachers’ own identities and teaching contexts, and how these interact.

Data Sources & Methods
This study draws on exit interview data (n=29) of the first cohort of teachers (n=7) across the five years of the project and segments of the PLCs in which teachers discussed their teaching practice (n=15). These data were analyzed in two rounds. The first focused on a critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 2018) and then a second pass of the interview data using thematic analysis (Braun & Clark, 2006).

Results
Although displaying variation in terms of their identities and contexts, teachers overwhelmingly considered the most valuable function of the PLC to be a social justice ideological touch-base from their teacher education program, what we refer to as an ideological homecoming, especially given what teachers viewed as an increasingly repressive sociopolitical context. Their participation in the PLC gave teachers mental space in which to reflect, think, “not let [social justice] go,” by learning different approaches to integrating social justice into teaching from each other. This trend continued across all years of the data, as was evident in the most recent interview data and classroom observations, as they articulated and displayed their continued vision and values of “strengths-based and asset-based versus deficit lens on teaching and especially with multilingual and disabled children.”

Significance
This study makes a critical contribution by illuminating what and how justice-centered teaching is carried forward by teachers from their teacher education programs over multiple years. Although the importance of such values being carried forward has been discounted in the broader literature in teacher learning, the concept of ideological homecoming captures the importance of what teachers can find of value in their professional learning during the novice teaching years that reifies and rearticulates the justice-centered values and pedagogy from teachers’ pre-service education.

Authors

• Cristina M. Betancourt, University of Wisconsin - Eau Claire

• Manka M. Varghese, University of Washington