Designing for Critical-Affective Pedagogies in Practice-Based Models of Teacher Education

• In Event: Teacher Educators Creating Critical and Anti-Oppressive Alternative Spaces Within University-Based Programs

Abstract

This paper examines what happened when university-based and school-based teacher educators (TEs) worked together to shift both the location and pedagogies of an elementary literacy methods course. The site, structure, and pedagogies of the course were designed to foster and support social justice commitments as an integral part of “core practices” of literacy instruction. Toward that goal, the course engaged “pedagogies of testimony and critical witness” (Authors) to blur boundaries between aspects of teacher preparation often approached separately in university teacher education: physical distance between university courses/instructors and practicum experiences, separation of critical frameworks/social foundations and content area preparation, and affective dimensions of pedagogy and instructional practices.
Perspective(s)
Our paper is grounded in the theories and pedagogies of “testimony and critical witness” (Authors), which engages critical, feminist, and poststructuralist theories of discourse, power, and affect (e.g., Ahmed, 2010; Cruz, 2008; Greg & Seigworth, 2010; Sandoval, 2012) as inextricable from specific instructional moves in literacy classrooms (McDonald, Kazemi, and Kavanaugh, 2013). We connect our work with other education researchers who conceptualize the intersections of lives and literacy as embodied, affective, critical, and consequential and suggestive of pedagogies that explicitly challenge the deficit narratives of success and engagement that prevail in educational policy and rhetoric (e.g., Blackburn, 2011; Jones, 2013; Winn, 2011).
Methods and Data
We drew on three categories of data for this paper. 1) interviews with undergraduate novice teachers and the third grade children with whom they worked closely during the semester. 2) artifacts from the course, including NTs lesson plans and reflections and instructors’ detailed lesson plans, handouts, and slides. 3) video of all course sessions as well as all of the NTs enactments of instruction with children. We analyzed each category of data using a) thematic coding to locate patterns as well as unique responses. b) critical and poststructuralist approaches to discourse and narrative analysis of participants’ language in the context of larger discourses of race, class, gender, sexuality, relationship, emotion, teaching and learning (Bhattacharya, 2009; Davies, 1997; Fairclough, 2013; Weedon, 1997).
Results
We highlight three overlapping findings: 1) role of vulnerability and critical witness in course pedagogies, NTs written and spoken accounts of their learning, and NTs positioning of themselves as advocates for children; 2) Instructors, NTs and children’s focus on emotion, relationship and knowledge of each others’ lives in course interactions and interview accounts of course experience; 3) NTs varying explicit and implicit take up of critical language of social justice. We show how intentional use of vulnerability by instructors and the location of critical perspectives constructed potential for students to story themselves into the critical-affective goals of the course while also potentially constraining public performance of resistance to critical frameworks.
Significance
As practice-based approaches to teacher education fast gain momentum in teacher preparation, teacher educators and the field needs to build better understandings of how to design models that place issues of power, justice, and relationship as central to pedagogy and work away from reductive notions of practice.

Authors

• Elizabeth M. Dutro, University of Colorado Boulder

• Ashley Cartun, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Ellie Haberl, University of Colorado - Boulder