Grappling with ‘bigger questions’ of teaching: Engaging in critical reflection through participation in cogenerative dialogues

This investigation explores the critical reflection of two urban high school science teachers as they participate in cogenerative dialogues--weekly discussions with focus groups of students that are held outside of instructional hours and that center on identifying and addressing problem areas of classroom teaching and learning. The study finds that, over their semester-long participation in the dialogues, the teachers often grappled with what they termed the big questions of teaching--tensions centering on the extent of scaffolding versus the demands of rigor, district-mandated curriculum versus student-centered inquiry, and the competing purposes of collaborative student work. Addressing such tensions within cogenerative dialogues helped the teachers progress from technical and comparative considerations of instruction, to more critical forms of reflection

Developing Mutual Accountability between Teachers and Students through Participation in Cogenerative Dialogues

In this study, I explore cogenerative dialogues as potentially supportive spaces for the development of mutual accountability and reciprocal learning between teachers and students, even within contexts dominated by high-stakes accountability and its associated challenges. In cogenerative dialogues, teachers gather with small groups of their students outside of instructional time to discuss classroom teaching and environment and to construct plans by which to improve student learning and wellbeing. Through a design-based case study, I worked with two science teachers, Lorena and Ellen, from urban high schools to establish and enact weekly cogenerative dialogues with their students over a period of five months. The high schools which framed the backdrop of this study served almost exclusively low-income Latino communities and had recently adopted strict measures of high-stakes teacher accountability. Findings indicated that, within the contexts of cogenerative dialogues, Ellen and Lorean engaged with their respective students in cycles of reflection that promoted mutualaccountability—an instantiation of which stands in stark contrast to the high-stakes accountability impacting so many teachers and schools today. I found that this cycle of mutual accountability was marked by three particular stages: Responsibility, or the solicitation of various stakeholder perceptions of problematic areas of classroom teaching and environment; Responsiveness, or the co-construction among teacher and students of potential solutions to such problems; and Report-and-Review, or moments where members of the dialogues reflected on, and held one another to account for, their endeavors within the enacted solution. At the same time, however, pressures associated with high-stakes accountability systems operating throughout the two high schools constrained the extent to which these stages of mutual accountability could fully emerge within the cogenerative dialogues. Thus, I argue that cogenerative dialogues can serve as important albeit limited spaces where teachers and students can, to a degree, re-appropriate ‘accountability’ as a mutually supportive element of relationship and learning, even when surrounding environments promote neoliberal, high-stakes interpretations of this concept

Why Should Students Want to Do a Close Reading?

This article explores the issue of student interest in close reading. In particular, it raises questions about the limited focus on student engagement in much of the current discourse about close reading and considers how teachers might build and sustain the student interest necessary for literacy activity, especially close reading. Specifically, we draw on sociocultural perspectives on literacy and emerging findings from our own research on teachers\u27 work with the Common Core Standards to describe a set of classroom practices we believe hold promise for facilitating engagement in close reading, particularly among students from historically underserved communities

Cultivating Catholic Classroom Communities During Remote Teaching

In this COVID-era study, Catholic school teachers report the challenges that they experienced in supporting classroom communities during remote instruction, as well as the strategies that they enacted to address such challenges and make robust relationships with and among remote students. While teachers engaged in remote teaching, they were also studying in a Catholic Master of Arts in Teaching program, where they participated in weekly Freirian culture circles – structured dialogues designed to help teachers identify problems of equity and collectively devise appropriate responses. The teachers found that classroom community was hindered by a lack of in-person affordances, socioemotional stressors related to the pandemic, struggles to engage students, and structures of hybrid teaching. In response, teachers used the culture circles to create and/or share strategies for supporting remote classroom communities, such as, classroom meetings and small-group collaboration. Teachers recognized that efforts developing classroom communities were intimately connected to commitments to equity

¡Con Ganas! Fostering Latina Students’ Active Participation in Science Classrooms through Their Involvement in Cogenerative Dialogues

This study explores cogenerative dialogues as potential spaces for supporting active participation among Latina students in science courses. I collaborated with two high school science teachers to enact cogenerative dialogues with five Latina students, each of whom had previously self-identified as reluctant class participants. Using a framework grounded in educación concepts of care, personalismo, and confianza, I found that, as the students took greater part in cogenerative dialogues, their active participation within in-class activities grew in parallel. This increase in participation was mediated by several conditions of cogenerative dialogues, which collectively fostered a spirit of community, agency, and science identity

Developing adaptive teaching practices through participation in cogenerative dialogues

This study explores the potential of cogenerative dialogues to help teachers develop the adaptive instructional practices necessary for ambitious approaches to teaching diverse students. Specifically, the investigation examines asks: What information can urban U.S. high school teachers learn about students through such dialogues? and How do such teachers later leverage this knowledge in adopting adaptive teaching practices in the classroom? Findings reveal that, through their involvement in cogenerative dialogues, participating teachers gained insights into students\u27 individual interests and social and learning needs. The teachers then utilized this new knowledge to enact classroom practices of responsive guidance and macro- and micro-adaptations

A case of teacher-assistant principals in Catholic schools: Spanning the boundary between administration and faculty through re-emergent practices in teacher leadership

Increasingly, teacher leaders are being asked to undertake administrative practices, particularly around instructional policy implementation. Yet little is known about this approach to teacher leadership in current educational contexts or how it may support teachers’ work as boundary spanners between administration and faculty. This case study explores the duties and collegial interactions of two teacher–assistant principals (teacher-APs) and examines the challenges and resources activated through their professional endeavors. Findings suggest that the teacher-APs served as consiglieres, instructional leaders, and mediators between faculty and administration. This work positioned the participants as boundary spanners, who activated resources around policy alignment but also faced substantial challenges like ambiguity, overload, and instructional trade-offs

Exploring Freirean Culture Circles and Boalian Theatre as Pedagogies for Preparing Asset-Oriented Teacher Educators

Background/Context: Teacher educator development remains an undertaking that is both understudied and underavailable as an explicit professional path, despite scholarship suggesting that teacher education’s transformative potential hinges on teacher educators’ pedagogical work. Purpose, Practice, & Participants: This article reports on a qualitative study that explored the development of teacher educators who expressed deep commitments to educational equity for minoritized youth. Fifteen current and prospective teacher educators participated over three years in situated adaptations of two critical pedagogical approaches: Freirean culture circles, where participants engaged in critical dialogue around conflicts encountered in their teacher education work that involved issues of inequity, particularly deficit-based ideas of P–12 students and their families, and Boalian theatre (or teatro), interactive role-play where participants dramatically re-enacted these conflicts and imagined potential responses to them. This study examines the ways in which these critical pedagogical spaces facilitated participants’ development as asset-oriented teacher educators. Research Design & Data Collection: This research represents an ethnographic self-study, as the authors engaged in culture circles and teatro as participant-researchers. To study these spaces of critical teacher educator development, the authors collected ethnographic data, which included semistructured interviews with each participant, field notes, and audio/video recordings of dialogue and role-play, as well as participant written reflections. Findings/Results: Through their engagement in culture circles and teatro, participants came to recognize some of the micro-pedagogies of asset-oriented teacher education, grappled with the relational dimensions of teacher learning, became familiar with possible tools of asset-oriented teacher education, and interrogated the social, political, and historical dimensions of the work. In doing so, they understood each area as linked both to specific settings and individuals and as connected to more common dilemmas that may play out across teacher education contexts. Conclusions/Recommendations: While cautioning against widespread, mechanistic implementation, the authors recognize culture circles and teatro as offering special promise for the development of asset-oriented teacher educators. In particular, findings suggest that these critical pedagogies support the conditions for learning—particularly spaces that center participants’ identities and experiential conflicts—that can cultivate complex understandings about, and tools for engaging, the contingent work of asset-oriented teacher education. Such spaces seem particularly well equipped to cultivate critical understandings deemed essential for transforming the field of teacher education

From approximations of practice to transformative possibilities: Using Theatre of the Oppressed as rehearsals for facilitating critical teacher education

Rehearsals and other approximations of practice are often touted as effective pedagogies for preparing teachers to reproduce/replicate practices deemed universally beneficial. However, scholars have noted that reproducing practices across contexts risks undermining equity and justice. This article reports on a three-year project that examined the potential of Boalian Theater and Freirean culture circles to facilitate learning among justice-oriented teacher educators. Using an ethnographic approach, the article shows how, guided by these critical pedagogies, rehearsals can facilitate transformational learning by re-imagining responses to dilemmas of practice in equity-oriented and contextually sensitive ways

From the ground up: cultivating teacher educator knowledge from the situated knowledges of emerging, asset-oriented teacher educators

This article offers findings from a qualitative study of the development of novice, asset-oriented teacher educators in the U.S. who, over three years, engaged monthly in an informal learning space inspired by Freirean Culture Circles and Boalian Theatre of the Oppressed. The article outlines the dynamic knowledges, perspectives, and tools that emerged as central to participants’ understandings about facilitating asset-oriented learning among prospective and practicing teachers in school and university settings. The article then argues that learning arrangements designed to support the coconstruction of contextualized, embodied understandings of asset-oriented teacher education hold special promise for equipping teacher educators to transform teacher education from an enterprise that centers whiteness to one that advances equity and justice