What Counts as Official Knowledge? Pursuing Accreditation in Today's Political Climate

• In Event: Latinx Experiences in U.S. Schools: Students, Teachers, Teacher Educators, and Education Allies as Collaborators

Abstract

What counts as official knowledge?:
Pursuing accreditation in today’s political climate

Purpose
For those institutions pursuing accreditation, the understanding that we live in a divisive political time means we are juxtaposed, left to discern what counts as official knowledge, which is sometimes in contrast to the pedagogies of the home shared by our pre-service teachers. The purpose of this study was to give voice to pedagogies of the home and identify ways to co-construct a meaning of the standards that reflects the culturally specific means of teaching and learning experienced by our Latinx pre-service teachers.
Theoretical Framing
The authors of this paper believe that standards for teacher preparation are subject to interpretation. In thinking about Latinx pre-service teachers, our interpretation of these standards is grounded in Chicana epistemologies, specifically Delgado-Bernal’s (2001) concept of Pedagogies of the Home. In higher education, standards drive what counts as official knowledge. It is our role, as culturally-responsive teacher educators, to interpret these standards in ways that will allow our students to carry what they learn from home into their educational journey.
Methods and Data Sources
To identify what counts as official knowledge, the authors of this paper performed a semiotic analysis of the teacher education standards (Saussure, 1966). Specifically, we analyzed the meaning that is attributed to the language of our diversity standards in relation to the experiences of our pre-service teachers. Our data was drawn from a mixed-methods case study we are conducting for the purposes of re-accreditation. Data included student autobiographies, faculty questionnaires, and the diversity standards for teacher preparation.
Results and Significance
Through our analysis, we found that our standards require us to prepare teachers with the theoretical and pedagogical they need to teach culturally and linguistically diverse learners. However, the standards do not specify which perspectives, or which types of skills teacher candidates should gain. The significance of this finding is that we can just as easily teach perspectives and skills that are biased and/or aligned to Eurocentric ideals for teaching and learning. In our analysis of student autobiographies, we found that order of identity mattered. In defining diversity, both the standards and our faculty identified race as the first line of difference that matters in teacher preparation. We found that while our non-Latinx students also spoke about race first, our Latinx students overwhelming spoke of their ethnic identities and nationalities and only sometimes spoke of their race. The significance of this finding is that by privileging ethnic identity, we may better acknowledge the social positions experienced by Latinx students.
We also found that our Latinx students practiced acts of resistance. Rogoff et al. (2016) reminds us that in Latino America, children learn by helping out. By observing their parents, and participating in community work, students learn how to collaborate. They also witness their families overcome social, linguistic and financial barriers. This teaches us that we need to be aware of the borderlands (Anzaldúa, 1987) in which these students operate, and to introduce pedagogies that foster collaboration and that mitigate students being left alone to struggle through acts of assimilation.

Authors

• Jaclyn Caires-Hurley, Western Oregon University

• Anne C Ittner, Western Oregon University

• Andrea M. Emerson, Western Oregon University