Identity Transformations of Practitioner Researchers in “Real” and “Surreal” Thirdspaces

• In Event: Roundtable Session 1
  In Roundtable Session: Deepening Our Understanding of Professional Learning Communities

Abstract

I report on a collaborative action research study, where five teachers who were new to such an approach to learning worked with me to inquire into teaching narrative writing in comics form. Even though tension is integral to professional learning, few studies report on how inexperienced teacher-researcher communities cultivate “generative tensions” (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009). For those that do, tension is often conceptualized negatively. Therefore, I provide an in-depth theoretical and practical view of tension in this paper. I focus on how we worked through tensions to cultivate “real” Thirdspaces (Soja, 1996) that transformed our practices and identities, and how we appeared to work through tension in “surreal” Thirdspaces that did little to change our practices and identities.

Author

• Rhonda L. Nixon, University of Victoria