Defining Expert Teachers in Argentina through a Community Nomination Approach

• In Event: Teacher education and Educational Reform

Proposal

Despite our strong belief in the significance of teachers in shaping students' educational journeys, we find ourselves pondering whether a universal standard exists for defining what truly makes an expert teacher. In an era where international organizations like OECD are pushing for standardized approaches to teacher expertise through initiatives like The Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) or Global Teaching Insights (2021), we maintain, in alignment with Berliner (2001), that identifying the attributes of expert teachers is a far more intricate task compared to recognizing experts in other domains. This paper aims to explore how members of an education community define what an expert teacher is. In this qualitative study, using a community nomination approach, we looked at two schools to document what characteristics different community actors recognize in expert teachers. Rather than relying on 'experts' voices' from an Ivory Tower, we argue that the education community can better define teachers' expertise.

Community nomination is a process through which researchers can acquire an 'emic' perspective. We are interested in looking at teachers' expertise through an insider's lens. The 'emic' approach we incorporate in our study enables us to determine the factors that determine expertise in a local context, which we then discuss with other notions of 'teaching expertise' previously captured in the specialized literature. Hence, through this paradigmatic stance, we focus on what Jones and Gwaltney defined as 'native anthropology.'

Teaching expertise has been defined in different terms. Some scholars focused on the importance of disciplinary knowledge in determining an educator's level of expertise (Berliner, 1991; Zeitz, 1994). Other researchers pivoted on teachers’ adaptability and flexibility skills (Borko & Livingston, 1989; Westerman, 1991). Other scholars interpreted that expert teachers could act autonomously, independent of what the external gaze dictated (Henry, 1995; Schemp et al., 1998).

Through our exploration of the literature, we concluded that there is scarce literature that has looked at the notion of expertise in Latin American countries. In addition, the participation of the educational communities is almost inexistent when looking into the issue of teachers' expertise. Even when other conceptualizations of expertise could be informative about what education communities value in Latin American countries, we consider it essential to describe the local particularities. Therefore, in this case, we propose exploring the notion of teacher expertise in one Latin American context, Argentina.

For this study, we decided to explore the issue of teacher expertise through a community nomination approach. This method of inquiry coined by Foster (1991) was also used by other scholars such as Ladson-Billings (1995). In one of the seminal papers on culturally relevant pedagogy, Ladson-Billings utilized the method of community nomination to identify teaching excellence in a predominantly African American, low-income elementary school district in Northern California. Ladson-Billings interviewed both parents and school principals to identify those teachers that were perceived by the community as ‘experts.' Building on that approach, we decided to include for this study the voices of four critical school actors: school principals and other administrators (N=8), schoolteachers (N=25), school parents (N=6), and students (N=75). We used semi-structured interview protocols for school administrators and parents to explore what these actors valued in educators. For students and schoolteachers, we used paper questionnaires. The open-ended questions asked surveyed participants to mention characteristics of what they valued the most in teachers. Given that we wanted to uphold educational communities' participation, we coded the interviews and then checked our findings with some of our participants. Doing this member checks of data collection increased the confirmability and credibility of our findings.

C. Wright Mills explained that the most outstanding academics are those who do not separate their work from their personal lives. According to the author, this happens because these academics take their work and personal life seriously; therefore, they conceive that instead of being in tension, personal and professional life nourish each other (Mills, 1959). Analogously, the indivisibility between personal traits and instructional practices was also one of the most striking findings of our paper.

One of the outstanding aspects of this paper is the existence of a series of continuities between the inner teaching world and their professional practices. That is, one of our most compelling findings has to do with the impossibility of separating the personal characteristics of teachers from their professional practices . Generally, what all community members value in an expert teacher is the confluence of personal traits (e.g., "being funny" or "being empathetic") with good instructional practices (for example, "using multiple teaching strategies for students to learn better"). That is, expert teachers are those who excel by personal traits and (not) those who excel only by their professional practices.

What was interesting about this finding was that all community members (parents, teachers, students, and administration members) were considered expert teachers, those who shared both personal traits, and those who excelled in their instructional practices. We came to this study with the preconception that while students would have valued more personal traits, administration members would focus more on instructional practices. Nonetheless, this was not the case; all actors participating in the community nomination process highlighted the need for the synergy of personal traits and good instructional practices.

The paper we present is the product of an intense community nomination process. The gist of our methodological design was to give back to who we consider to be the heart of the education system, the voice that colonial voices in academia took away from them. In this paper, we argue that we conceived the community nomination process with the humble intent of giving back to members of school communities the right to determine what is valuable for them. We hope that the methodological design of our paper will open new spaces to debate how to re-empower those "at the bottom," those key school actors (students, parents, teachers, and school administration) whose voices have been increasingly forgotten.

Authors

• Ezequiel Gomez Caride, Universidad De San Andrés

• Ignacio Barrenechea, Universidad De San Andrés