Was it for consequential learning? Pedagogical autoethnography from one teacher’s comparative reflection

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Wednesday I)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: The power of transnational experiences in morphing teacher identity and teaching practice

Proposal

Purpose: The culture of science education in South Korea (SK) strongly values normative outcomes (e.g., short-term academic achievement). This creates tensions for many science teachers as to whether to teach science as a demanding subject and/or a meaningful endeavor relevant to their lives. This paper focuses on how one teacher navigated the tensions in ways that promoted consequential learning (CL) for her students. The study’s author, as a previous science teacher in SK, conducted an auto-ethnography of her past teaching practice with a consequential-learning lens she gained through studying science education abroad. Zooming in her teaching artifacts, this study addresses two research questions (RQ):
1. Whether/how are her teaching practices CL-oriented?
2. How had the cultural-historical context of SK’s science education intersected with her teaching practice at multiple scales?

Theoretical framework: We ground our work in equity-oriented research of consequential learning for science-that-matters to students in the here-and-now (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016). In CL-oriented classrooms, students are rightful presence who decide to learn what, how, and why, as teachers’ pedagogical partners rather than recipients/guests (Authors, 2018). Rigorous engagement with science should aim for students’ enacting agency for themselves and their communities: their science-empowered lives. We operationalize CL’ features referring to these studies, which will be used for our auto-ethnographic analysis.

Method: Data include teacher artifacts of classroom teaching, school projects, teacher assessments, and professional development, generated between 2015-2016 in SK. We conduct autoethnography to find evidence of CL (or lack thereof) from her teaching practices reflected in artifacts, referring to CL’s features drawn from theoretical framework (RQ1); to identify multi-scalar intersectionality around teaching practices (RQ2), applying cultural-historical action theory framework.

Preliminary Findings: We found that our teacher’s artifacts presented limited but still consequentiality-oriented practices. While our teacher’s pedagogical-self did not critically notice the concept of CL, due to multi-scalar reasons intersected with her classroom teaching (e.g., her identity, agency, teacher education, the school, and SK’s education culture), there did exist CL-oriented moments, some of which co-generated with students became her classroom culture, were enjoyed and sustained by students. In this paper we examine these moments and how they built towards more CL outcomes. One example is how the practice of choreographic flash mob dancing to the Maroon 5 song "Sugar," across the year, offered school-mates an on-going public narrative on photosynthesis. The video was then taken up over time in different classroom lessons.

Significance: This study suggests one useful lens of teaching analysis (autoethnography) and one meaningful focus of science teaching (consequential learning) to the educational contexts in which the lens and focus could have definitely existed, but stayed implicit, simplified, or abstract. By making them explicit, nuanced, and concrete, this study proposes the way of reflecting and developing pedagogical-self for both preservice and inservice teachers.

Authors

• Won Kim, Michigan State University

• Angela Calabrese-Barton, Michigan State University