Reshaping Teacher Professional Development: Ethical Accompaniment in Landscapes of Practice

• In Event: Visions for the Future: Transforming Practice and Process in Teacher Education

Abstract

This session presents a model for reimagining teacher professional development as ethical accompaniment, grounded in relational and reciprocal practice. Drawing on Cara Furman’s Teaching with an Ethical Center, Kinloch and San Pedro’s Projects in Humanization, and Robin Wall Kimmerer’s work on the gift economy, this project investigates how experienced English teacher-researchers engage in collaborative inquiry on speaking and listening within their landscapes of practice. Rejecting top-down models that instrumentalize teacher learning, this study explores how teacher-led development fosters ethical, relational, and reparative professional growth. Using collaborative methods like storying, sense-making sessions, and interruptions, the project demonstrates how veteran teachers enact and refine their philosophies of education in ways that sustain their professional identities and contribute to education beyond their classrooms. This work offers a vision for reconstructing teacher development as a practice of care, reciprocity, and collective flourishing.

Author

• Ginger Barnhart, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill