UC Berkeley

A significant challenge confronts the design of teacher education: how to leverage an expansive theory of teacher learning of which equity is central in the context of historically entrenched institutional norms and practice. Following Engeström (1991), these norms and practices have contributed to an encapsulation of schooling that makes it difficult for teachers to understand the importance of everyday practice in expansive forms of learning. To understand teachers’ co-learning and co-design, this study examined how teachers develop new pedagogical conceptualizations as they attempt to leverage youths’ everyday cultural practices.

In this social design-based study (Gutiérrez & Jurow, 2016), teachers’ sense-making was documented across a range of teacher practices: collaborative inquiry in several activity settings, and in cognitive ethnographies, to capture shifts in how teachers came to see students as competent meaning-makers. Through the participation framework (Goodwin, 2007), I saw the various stances that teachers deploy in their co-operative action (Goodwin, 2017) as they made sense of new pedagogical conceptualizations that seek to build with youth. In this study, teacher learning was conceptualized as collective activity, which provided a window into the various commitments that were still evolving in the collective space of the teacher education classroom.

Findings show that teachers in this study shifted in their pedagogical approaches, subsequently generating theoretically informed conjectures about the social organization of learning in their classrooms. One teacher initially conceived of his role in the classroom as a peripheral participant, as he was expected, as a student teacher, to help youth stay on task. However, as he appropriated course theories, specifically those on third space (Gutiérrez, 2008) and socio-spatial repertoires (Cortez & Gutiérrez, 2019), this teacher began to attend to specific features of the broader classroom environment; in effect, he began to turn away from solely focusing on individual students’ who he believed were disengaged. In addition, by using critical discourse analysis as an analytical lens, the participant was able to see classroom discourse patterns as opportunities for leveraging the everyday cultural practices of youth and connecting them to a larger structural analysis of power.

This study further highlights the co-operative action (Goodwin, 2017) of two teachers as they experimented with course theories in their reflections on their pedagogical practices. Through this experimentation, the participants began to center their meaning making on the everyday practices of youth, as well as imagine new possibilities for their practices. Through their collective actions, we see changes in how they participate with one another and their peers as they struggled to move beyond more general prescriptions for teaching toward more specific approaches that were oriented toward leveraging the everyday through the design of the elements of learning. In particular, the teachers in my study focused their efforts on the possibilities that can emerge in the design of more flexible and open-ended discursive classroom practices. In this respect, shifting in their critiques of students, schools and their cooperating teachers toward examining the possibilities in their role in the classroom and their pedagogical approach.

Through the use of theoretical and technological tools, this study contributes to a theory of learning in which youths’ everyday practices are an inherent part of teachers’ transformative learning. But, more importantly, the study offers implications for the design of pre-service teachers’ conversations about practice and theory. As the field begins to shift toward examining teachers’ learning and development in the context of collaborative reflection, we need to know more about the affordances and constraints in how teachers jointly make meaning of pedagogical practices and theories on learning.