Empowering Teachers for Equitable and Sustainable Education: Action Research, Teacher Agency and Online Community

Group Submission Type: Book Launch

Description of Session

This book explores teachers learning to engage with epistemologically sound research to develop agency to advance culturally sustaining humanizing practices. Using comparative education theory and the UNESCO SDGs--the most influential contemporary worldwide movement in education--teachers thoroughly research a global topic connected to social justice with application to their local context. Over the 1.5-year M.Ed. all-online program, teachers take courses on theoretical framing, research design, and data collection methods, review the literature, develop a proposal, and implement an action research project. This book describes an approach that supports teachers’ learning to engage in authoritative justice-inquiry-based research. It presents formative and summative evidence of culturally and socially transformative learning. As a result of engaging in this inquiry-based program, teachers’ ways of thinking and acting have changed traditional ways of approaching teaching and school policies toward taking on the role of analysts, knowers, and advocates for social justice and equity in their community.

This book contributes to the scholarship of teaching and learning (Shulman, 2011) in that it describes and investigates the impact of an innovative all-online M. Ed., Global Education Program at Arizona State University (ASU), a large public university in the Southwest of the U.S. The editors are the director of the program (Tatto) and a Ph.D. student at ASU and a graduate of the program (Brown), respectively. The program enrolls practicing teachers, and a sample of these are the chapter authors and graduates of the program.

The M. Ed. Global Education (GLE) program has national and international reach. It is designed to prepare practicing teachers to acquire powerful knowledge and gain agency toward equitable and justice-oriented educational practices by engaging in action research within a comparative framework and in a dialogue between their local and the larger global context.
This book addresses three fundamental questions as we seek to improve learning and teaching in school systems:

(1) How should we prepare teachers to educate students in uncertain, insecure moments where competing values, pressures, and agendas exceed the traditional scope of the profession?
(2) What is the need that this program addresses?
(3) What are the challenges and impacts of this program?

The program centers on the search for equity and justice locally and globally and uses three frameworks: (a) the UNESCO (2016) Sustainable Goals that seek to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and lifelong learning for all; (b) comparative education theory (Holmes, 1981; Mugo & Wolhuter, n.d.) which allows current teachers to go beyond the local to the global by exploring how other systems deal with education challenges; and (c) transformative learning theory (Mezirow, 2000) which seeks to help individuals “change their frames of reference by critically reflecting on their assumptions and beliefs and consciously making and implementing plans that bring about new ways of defining their worlds” in a process that is seen as “fundamentally rational and analytical.” After eighteen months of study, program graduates produce evidence-based action research reports addressing emergent issues that impact access and equity for disadvantaged communities in their locality and as reflected globally.

The central premise of the program is that teachers must become comparative, global, and local action researchers to have agency in their practice and to become effective advocates for the cultural and learning needs of their students, especially those in disadvantaged contexts or “learning at the bottom of the pyramid” (Wagner et al., 2018). By learning comparative framing and social science methods, reviewing the literature to select verifiable educational research, and developing and implementing a plan for action research, teachers can effectively respond to recent UNESCO calls to reimagine and create promising futures locally.

Sub Unit

• Book launches and Workshops / Book Launch

Chair

• Mark Ginsburg, University of Maryland

Book Launch Presenter

• Maria Teresa Tatto, Arizona State University

Discussant

• Noah W Sobe, UNESCO