Blurring the Roles of Teacher and Teacher Educator: Critically Remediating Teaching and Teacher Educating

• In Event: 41.044 - Developing Practices to Recognize and Address the Political and Ideological Aspects of Educators' Everyday Work

Abstract

Objective: Teaching and teacher education are inherently different –– but highly interdependent –– endeavors (Goodwin et al., 2014). This paper explores the affordances of blurring the roles of teachers and teacher educators and the practices of teaching and “teacher educating” (Goodwin et al., 2014).

Theoretical Framework: Embracing a need for transformation and for critical and authentic dialogue (Freire, 1970) to take place in order for teaching and teacher education to be re-mediated (Cole & Griffin, 1983), our theoretical framework combines critical pedagogy and cultural historical activity theory.

Data/Methods: Our inquiry was jointly conducted by a elementary school teacher and a university-based teacher educator and consisted of a 3-year participatory action research (Koshy, 2010) project in New York City. The project sought to blur the boundaries of a primary grade classroom in a public school serving primarily children of color from low-/no-income families and an early childhood teacher education program in a predominantly White institution of higher education. We co-taught our classes at the elementary school and in the teacher education program. There was fluidity between these spaces as lessons that were designed and discussed in the teacher education program were taught in the classroom and observations from the classroom informed the direction of the teacher education course.

Data were collected 1-3 days per week, from September to June between September 2012 and June 2015, documenting over 700 hours across three academic years. We collected and analyzed videos, ethnographic field notes, reflective journals, audio-recorded dialogues, and artifacts. Throughout the process, each year, we constructed an audit trail to document our inquiry. From the audit trail, we formed two sets of data packets (Rogers & Mosley, 2006)—one temporally- and one thematically-organized. Further, we engaged in critical narrative analysis (Souto-Manning, 2014), seeking to uncover the power institutional discourses (Chouliaraki & Fairclough, 1999), which permeated our (and our students’) everyday narratives—seeking to identify possibilities and problematize challenges. That is, we came to see ideology in the everyday.

Conclusions: Traditional distinctions and hierarchies between the university and schools were disrupted as the teacher and teacher educator shared responsibilities and insights across both contexts. Additionally, assumptions of knowledge were upended and the curriculum was re-negotiated in ways that eventually became more inclusive and equitable as the elementary school students drew on their experiential knowledge to “read the world” (Freire, 1970) in ways that were new and unfamiliar to pre-service teachers. Through the analysis of a corpus of everyday narratives, we found that “pedagogical third spaces” (Souto-Manning, 2010), which re-mediate curriculum and teaching in hopeful and powerful ways, can be fostered when we blur the roles of teacher and teacher educator and disrupt assumptions where knowledge about teaching and learning is produced.

Significance: By blurring of the roles of teacher and teacher educator, the fields of teaching and teacher education stand to create more robust environments for learning, re-mediating (Cole & Griffin, 1983) universities and schools instead of seeking to remediate (read: fix) teachers.

Author

• Mariana Souto-Manning, Teachers College, Columbia University