Using Video-microanalysis to Examine Identity Construction During Teacher Collaboration

Urban high school teachers in the U.S. work under challenging conditions and are often isolated from their peers during much of their school days (Shank, 2006). As a consequence, learning communities that develop organically (Wenger, 1998) in urban schools tend to emerge as informal social support networks more than as intentional collaborations (Shank, 2006). Recent studies show that teacher collaboration and a sense of community are essential for stimulating substantive classroom change that does more than just perpetuate the status quo of the school (Glazer and Hannafin, 2006; Shank, 2006; Snow-Gerono, 2005). When it comes to integrating technology, collaboration is essential because using technology in the classroom is not simply another pedagogical technique. For teachers, reconceptualizing who they are as teachers, transforming their identity or sense of self in the classroom, is a necessary part of technology integration because this may go against the grain of everything they have experienced in their own education and their teacher training experiences. For many urban teachers, using technology in their classrooms, specifically in ways that empower students, may be unfamiliar and daunting. Consequently, being able to collaborate with like-minded educators can serve as one step toward envisioning new ways to teach that involve technology use for students. The English/Technology Curriculum Writing Group at the Discovery Institute, College of Staten Island, CUNY was designed with this in mind. The intent was to create a space where teachers with diverse experiences and backgrounds could collaborate, exchange ideas, and gain new resources, thereby beginning to transform their identities as teachers and technology users. The purpose of the study was to use video microanalysis to identify when and how teacher/technology user identities are re/constructed during teacher collaboration

Critical Pedagogy and Educational Research

Scholar‐practitioners of critical pedagogy and critical research on and extend a number of theories and methods but have the common goal of giving education and research a humanized approach in contemporary society, through Critical Pedagogy. This special issue aims at providing a broad overview of why researchers embrace critical pedagogy and critical research. Inspired by critical theory and other philosophies, Critical Pedagogy seeks to develop awareness and help question beliefs and practices that are alleged to dominate

Looking to Transform Learning: From Social Transformation in the Public Sphere to Authentic Learning in the Classroom

In and out of school technology uses present themselves differently. Namely, outside structures more often than not reflect distributed knowledge models, while inside structures mirror hierarchical ones. Drawing upon theoretical frames of cultural sociology and critical pedagogy, the paper aims to contrast the structures of participation outside and inside school walls. We illustrate that looking outside the classroom gives us insight into how teachers might more readily and actively engage youth in meaningful applications activity. Specifically, we use the former to inform the later. We conclude with implication for using outside technology participation to reconceptualize inside learning designs

Sustaining Technology in a Discovery Learning Community

Difficulty integrating technology into classrooms is a well-known challenge. As early as the 1920’s, radio and film were predicted to be innovations that would change the classroom. In the 1950’s, it was television, in the ‘60s and 70’s teaching machines, and from the ‘80’s to the present, computers. Generally, the teachers who embrace technology are the rare minority, and those who don’t are blamed for the break-down in implementation because they are regarded as showing, “indifference, lethargy, even antagonism, toward this revolutionary means of communication” (Tyack & Cuban 123). But the truth of the matter is “in the top-down process of advocating and implementing technology, teachers [are] rarely consulted, though it [is] mainly their job to make it work in the classroom” (Tyack & Cuban 121). Currently, with the near universal availability of the personal computer, it is hard to understand why many teachers still do not use computers in their classrooms. If the machines are installed in their rooms and the teachers receive training, how is it that computers often go unused other than to reward children for finishing schoolwork early or for good behavior? While working with the teachers employed at The Discovery Institute, I have begun examining how and why some teachers use technology with their students while others don’t, and have found that educating teachers rather than training teachers to use technology and providing the support of a community of learners seems to play a significant factor in whether a teacher will or will not use technology to enhance her or his classroom. Through further interviews and focus group observation, I expect to find that teachers who merely receive training outside a discovery learning experience and without the professional and emotional support of a community of learners will be less likely to effectively use technology in their classrooms

Walking with Freire: Exploring the Onto-Epistemological Dimensions of Critical Pedagogy

One of the great misconceptions about critical pedagogy, Paulo Freire’s democratic theory of education, is that transformative learning is an activity that takes place in the mind. In this paper, the authors demonstrate the significance of material context in Paulo Freire’s conceptualization of his philosophy of democratic education. By using the theories of wayfinding (a sub-division of human geography) and critical posthumanism in dialogue with Paulo Freire’s autobiographical reflections in his post-Pedagogy of the Oppressed writings, the authors illustrate how critical pedagogy involved a literal reading of the material world. By sharing vignettes from his work in Brazil, Guinea-Bissau, Porto Mont, New York we highlight the significance of the body, emotions, and individual and local history as partners in the political-pedagogical project of transformative learning. Critical pedagogy is recast as an onto-epistemological praxis in which critical consciousness is understood as a process of becoming that is made possible through the relationship between the person and their land, including all its human and non-human inhabitants

Introduction: Critical Pedagogy Under the Radar and Off the Grid

Fall 2010: We (Tricia, Donna, and Pat) are beginning to feel restless as our college is in the throws of devising “measurable standards” and, accordingly, “input-output” measurement schemes in preparation for an upcoming TEAC review that looms one year on the horizon. At times together and at times separately, we sit through many meetings about rubrics, e-portfolios, and espoused best practices, feeling antsy and angst-y, not very different from bored high schoolers texting each other in the back of the classroom. After we leave these faculty brainstorming sessions, we enter into our classrooms where we work with pre-service and in-service teachers and administrators, and we introduce them to critical pedagogy. Our students receive the content and pedagogy with mixed reactions. Some feel quite liberated, perhaps vindicated because this is how they had been teaching all along. Others think criticality is “nice, but impractical,” and some consider it counter-productive to helping students meet proficiency on standardized math and reading exams. Whichever the case, there seems to be a common sentiment among many of our students that critical pedagogy would be great in an ideal world, but in the “real world” of schools, it simply can’t happen because “there just isn’t time” or “it doesn’t align with the standards” or “it would be seen as insubordination by the administration.

Radically Listening to Radical Love: Toward Enactivism in Education and Educational Research

At the 2014 annual meeting of the American Educational Studies Association (AESA), a group of scholars convened a panel honoring the life and work of Joe L. Kincheloe at the five-year anniversary of his passing. Dozens of scholars from around the world attended and engaged in a discussion about Kincheloe’s influences on their work and his contributions to critical pedagogy and educational scholarship more broadly. From that session, Mary Frances Agnello and William Reynolds recruited authors to contribute to an edited volume about Joe Kincheloe’s contributions to teacher education (Agnello & Reynolds, 2015). One of these authors was Tricia Kress who (with Melissa Winchell and Kenneth Tobin) wrote a chapter further developing Joe Kincheloe’s notion of radical listening (Winchell, Kress, & Tobin, 2015)

Leveraging Local Knowledge to Envision Educational Policy and Management Outside the Plunder of Neoliberal Technorationality [Editorial]

Using the supply chain bottleneck of the post-covid19 pandemic as a lens, editors of this special issue demonstrate problematic aspects of neoliberal technorationality when applied to educational policy and management. They offer humanism as a counterweight to the problematics of neoliberalism in education and illustrate how local knowledge in spaces of learning are always present, provide visions of different futures and offer potential for transformation outside seemingly totalizing neoliberal discourses

Listening for the Echoes: Radical Listening as Educator-Activist Praxis

Using a postformal approach to co/autoethnography, the authors examine narrative reflections of their own teaching practice to draw forth implications for radical listening as educator-activist praxis. By using the controlling metaphor of noise, the authors illuminate the challenges of listening radically amidst the “white noise” of hegemony. The authors demonstrate radical listening as echoes of an imperfect praxis of being and becoming that must be revisited repeatedly over time