The Critical Consciousness Paradox: Teachers' Collaborative Sense-Making About Student-Centered Discussions and Critical Consciousness Development

• In Event: Understanding Teachers as Learners Through Their Collaborative Sense-Making

Abstract

Purpose and Objectives
For decades, literacy scholarship has promoted dialogic instruction in which students have interpretive agency when working with complex texts (Anagnostopoulos, Smith, & Nystrand, 2008; Aukerman, Belfatti, & Santori, 2008). This type of instruction, however, remains rare (Cazden, 2001; Nystrand et al. 2003). A parallel contradiction in contemporary literacy scholarship is that while scholarly literature is rife with arguments about the importance of facilitating dialogue about race and racism with students (Thomas, 2015), race talk in schools remains rare or shallow in many schools (Howard & Navarro, 2016; Pollack, 2004). To understand this gap, we designed a series of “learning labs,” (Gibbons, Kazemi, & Lewis, 2017) which were job-embedded teacher learning experiences where the enactment of practice in a classroom with children was the center of the learning experience. By studying these labs, we were interested in understanding what tensions arose for teachers as they transitioned between professional development and classroom instruction. In particular, our investigation was grounded in the following question: What tensions arose for teachers as they collectively planned, enacted, and reflected on attempts to facilitate dialogic discussions about literacy texts centering on issues of race and racism?

Theoretical Perspectives
We ground our study in sociocultural theories of learning, and specifically, cultural historical activity theory (Engeström, Miettinen, & Punamäki, 1999). Guided by this theoretical orientation, our investigation focused on understanding the cultural-historical contradictions and tensions that arose for participating teachers, particularly those that led to dialectical transformations in how teachers thought about dialogic classroom discussions about texts centering on race and racism (Engeström, 2001).

Methods
Working with nine pre-service and in-service teacher participants at one K-8 school, we drew on data both from the learning labs and from teachers’ subsequent independent classroom practice. Data included video footage of six full-day learning labs as well as eighteen videos of teachers’ independent practice; sixteen pre and post semi-structured interviews with teachers; and thirteen video stimulated recall interviews. Data analysis involved inductive and deductive coding using theoretically derived codes.

Results
We began our analysis by identifying those areas where participating teachers, as a collective, seemed to undergo major perspective shifts about facilitating dialogic discussions about texts focusing on race and racism. Next, we traced the topics of these shifts back through one year of data to identify the tensions that emerged over time, which may have informed later shifts in perspective. Our analysis revealed one primary tension. On the one hand teachers wanted students to develop critical consciousness about issues of race and racism, but on the other hand, they worried that without didactic instruction in critical ideologies, students might develop attitudes about race that reproduced oppressive histories.

Significance
Studies have investigated how job-embedded professional development approaches like learning labs can support teachers’ learning around content and facilitation. Much less is known about how the model can support teachers to challenge inequities. This study has implications for scholars in communities focused on issues of equity and justice in schools as well as scholars in communities focused on designs for teacher learning and instructional improvement.

Authors

• Sarah Schneider Kavanagh, University of Pennsylvania

• Chenelle Boatswain, University of Pennsylvania

• Elizabeth Gotwalt, University of Pennsylvania