(Re)beginning and becoming: antiracism and professional development with white practicing teachers

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on an educational foundations-based professional development (PD) curriculum of antiracist conscientization we as two teacher educators designed and implemented with eight white practicing teachers in the Midwestern United States. We first articulate our conception of educational foundations and curriculum theory as a framework for our PD. We briefly review literature on other PD on race in the United States, outline our data sources, and describe the pedagogy and curriculum of RaceWork’s Tripartite Model of race-visible and antiracist praxis. We then highlight, through interview data, the significance of group (relational) accountability and collaborative relationships that supported these teachers’ self-designed antiracist interventions in their own unique school contexts during the 2-year PD experience. An ongoing, relationship-based PD model leading to material antiracist changes and practices points to a need for a broader, more holistic, and contextualized conception of antiracist interventions in U.S. public P12 school contexts, but also one grounded in the notion that in a white supremacist society, we (as race-visible white educators) are always becoming antiracist.     

Toward Transparency: Competing discourses of teacher educators and teachers

This self-study emerged within the context of a school-based professional development project that established collaboration between two teacher educators and a group of elementary public school teachers. We launched the Book in a Bag project as a way to promote curriculum integration in classrooms and at the same time to provide a venue for research. Within the two contexts of university and public schools, certain knowledge and practices were privileged, largely as a result of the distinct stewardships each assumes. When tensions arose in the course of the project, we employed self-study methodology. We identified competing discourses of teachers, teacher educators, and partnership, noting paradoxes that focused on discourse-bound knowledge, discourse-driven motivation, and discourse-limited aspirations. Self-study served to deepen our understanding of our own practices and ourselves as teacher educators with an eye to future relationships with teachers.     

Designing for Critical,Relational, Practice-Immersed Teacher Preparation: Weaving Threads into Tapestry in a Critical Project-Based Literacy Partnership

As teacher educators located in K–12 and university contexts, we had experienced the often-highlighted disconnections between university teacher education and preservice apprenticeships in schools. Thus, calls for innovations in preparation programs aimed at deeper immersion in practice spoke to our desires to move literacy methods preparation into schools in ways that allowed teacher candidates, children, classroom teachers, and university instructors to be together in practice. A central goal of our work was to use our partnership as a path toward deeply intertwining practices of literacy teaching with critical lenses and pedagogies centered on justice. In this article, we situate our partnership in the landscape of research on practice-based teacher preparation and critical scholarship in teacher education. We describe our partnership, including its layers of contexts, relationships, and opportunities for critical, mediated practice, and our methods of studying our work over time. Our findings illustrate how the design of our partnership has afforded opportunities to (a) trace how critical ideas and practices thread across contexts of participants’ learning and (b) critically reframe problematic language, policies, and practices with novice teachers. We end by highlighting implications of our work for others invested in critical project-based partnerships.     

An Application of an Innovative Cost-Benefit Analysis Tool for Determining the Implementation Costs and Public Safety Benefits of SORNA with Educational Implications for Criminology and Criminal Justice

Sex offending is a considerable public health and criminal justice system concern. While the research is fairly mixed at best with most pointing toward a general lack of an appreciable deterrent benefit for these polices, no prior evaluation has made a rigorous attempt to determine and define the vast array of implementation costs and public safety benefits of these policies, specifically the Sex Offender and Registration and Notification Act (SORNA). As such, our proposed research strategy involves the development and application of an innovative Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA) tool. The results from this innovative and dynamic CBA tool with hypothetical data suggests that the 10-year financial benefit for SORNA ranges from $1.01 to $3.91 for every dollar spent when considering the reduction in sex crime specifically, and any crime more generally. This tool holds promise as a mechanism for generating jurisdiction/site-specific cost-benefit analyses. Policy implications are also discussed.     

Beyond records and representations: inbetween writing in educational ethnography

Ethnographers are particularly interested in writing. They have paid particular attention to the practices of making field notes and to the ways in which their public texts represent those that they have encountered and studied. To date there has been less attention paid to the kinds of writing that used to make sense of experiences in the field. We call this inbetween writing. By examining our own processes of inbetween writing, and drawing on the work of James Clifford, we have produced a nine-part heuristic of inbetween writing. We argue that the heuristic could be used in research methods education to highlight the importance of writing to ethnographic sense-making and knowledge production.     

Exploring ethical issues associated with using online surveys in educational research

Online surveys are increasingly used in educational research, yet little attention has focused on ethical issues associated with their use in educational settings. Here, we draw on the broader literature to discuss 5 key ethical issues in the context of educational survey research: dual teacher/researcher roles; informed consent; use of incentives; privacy, anonymity, and confidentiality; and data quality. We illustrate methods of addressing these issues with our experiences conducing online surveys in educational contexts. Moving beyond the procedural ethics approach commonly adopted in quantitative educational research, we recommend adopting a situated/process ethics approach to identify and respond to ethical issues that may arise during the conduct, analysis, and reporting of online survey research. The benefits of online surveying in comparison to traditional survey methods are highlighted, including the potential for online surveys to provide ethically defensible methods of conducting research that would not be feasible in offline education research settings.     

The girl with the garden gloves: researching the affordances of sensual materialities in the school garden

ABSTRACT

This article uses vignettes and photographs taken from ethnographic research to reframe the methodological assumptions within school garden research. New theoretical perspectives are applied to previous empirical school garden research that provides deeper understandings of both the teaching and the learning of ecoliteracy in such material contexts. Actor Network Theory and Social Semiotics further highlight the affordance of school garden spaces. We make public the conversations of a small research group about a perceived ethnographic turn towards materiality, aesthetics and agency.     

Using the Theory of Satisficing to Evaluate the Quality of Survey Data

Increasingly colleges and universities use survey results to make decisions, inform research, and shape public opinion. Given the large number of surveys distributed on campuses, can researchers reasonably expect that busy respondents will diligently answer each and every question? Less serious respondents may “satisfice,” i.e., take short-cuts to conserve effort, in a number of ways—choosing the same response every time, skipping items, rushing through the instrument, or quitting early. In this paper we apply this satisficing framework to demonstrate analytic options for assessing respondents’ conscientiousness in giving high fidelity survey answers. Specifically, we operationalize satisficing as a series of measurable behaviors and compute a satisficing index for each survey respondent. Using data from two surveys administered in university contexts, we find that the majority of respondents engaged in satisficing behaviors, that single-item results can be significantly impacted by satisficing, and that scale reliabilities and correlations can be altered by satisficing behaviors. We conclude with a discussion of the importance of identifying satisficers in routine survey analysis in order to verify data quality prior to using results for decision-making, research, or public dissemination of findings.     

Saudi Teachers’ Perceptions of In-Service Education and Training Addressing Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder

Worldwide, 3.0–7.0 percent of school-aged children meet criteria for a diagnosis of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). In Saudi Arabia, ADHD appears to be more prevalent than the worldwide average, with estimates of 12.6–16.7 percent. Unfortunately, there is a relative dearth of research addressing ADHD and related training programs in Saudi Arabia. We investigated perceptions of teachers in Saudi elementary schools regarding current In-Service Education and Training (INSET) programs addressing students diagnosed with ADHD. We interviewed 40 teachers (15 women and 25 men) from public elementary schools in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. The findings highlight the need to develop INSET programs specifically addressing best practices for managing and educating students diagnosed with ADHD.     

Home-to-school transport in contemporary schooling contexts: an irony in motion

This paper explores ‘home–school’ transport in contemporary schooling contexts in England. Home–school transport is a complex issue lying between government departments, policy frameworks, research and professional disciplines. It is complicated further by commercial and private interests alongside social and public ones. Informed by an interdisciplinary literature, the authors argue that there is an urgent need to develop understanding of the position of home–school transport policy and practices in contemporary schooling contexts, particularly in relation to school choice making and enactment. This paper calls for research to inform the development of home–school transport policy and practices that are socially just and sustainable.     

论挪用公款罪的犯罪对象

挪用公款罪是一种多发性犯罪，尤其是近年来在我国市场经济的建立过程中呈上升的趋势。但是在司法实践中还存在诸多问题没有解决，如挪用公款罪的犯罪对象有哪些表现形式，实践中如何认定其犯罪对象等。因而应对其作进一步研究以利于完善挪用公款罪。     

Christianity and rural community literacy practices in Uganda

In this article, we examine how Christianity provides the impetus for local literacy practices in a rural community in Uganda. These Christian literacy practices form a central part of the literacy activities of the community and are manifested in a variety of contexts from public to private, using a wide variety of readily available religious texts in the community. Through examination of Christian literacy practices, the authors suggest that ethnographic research has the potential to generate information that can be used to enhance literacy learning in rural community life.     

The Development of a Community of Practice for Educators Working with Newcomer,Spanish-speaking Students

Drawing on 3 years of observational, survey, and interview data, this article highlights the importance of communities of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991) for school staff members supporting Spanish-speaking, newcomer students in large, comprehensive high schools that often lack the resources to directly support this population. We highlight how a research project focused on the implementation and development of a bilingual math and science curriculum across 4 schools in urban and rural California provided teachers, counselors and school leaders the necessary space and community to know what and how to best serve immigrant, Spanish-dominant students. The article demonstrates how these school staff people leveraged the research project meetings and check-ins with research assistants to share best practices and common challenges across schools and roles when working with newcomer students.     

Teaching Practices Grounded in Foundational Knowledge,Visions, and Contexts

Drawing on our experiences as teacher educators in two programs designed specifically to prepare teachers for particular contexts, this article illustrates how we design our courses to help new teachers link foundational understandings to specific teaching practices in particular school and classroom contexts. We describe our integrated approach, in which candidates learn theory and practice simultaneously, breaking down the dichotomies of theory and practice while connecting to specific contexts or settings and understanding the relationship of practices to visions of good teaching.     

Researching literacy in context: using video analysis to explore school literacies

This article addresses how methodological approaches relying on video can be included in literacy research to capture changing literacies. In addition to arguing why literacy is best studied in context, we provide empirical examples of how small, head‐mounted video cameras have been used in two different research projects that share a common aim: understanding the complex ways in which literacy is a part of school practices. The complexity of literacy practices taking place in classrooms, where students draw on a number of texts for a variety of purposes and different literacy discourses co‐exist in the same setting, poses a serious challenge for those who wish to study literacy in educational settings. The methodology presented in this article is our attempt to meet this challenge. Our approach relies on using video equipment in innovative ways to capture multiple perspectives, involving research participants in the data collection process and the early stages of analysis, and analysing video data with digital coding software. These methods are combined to obtain a more systematic and detailed insight into the contexts in which literacy takes place.     

Imagining pedagogy in public space: visions of cultural policies and practices in a city in transformation

This paper reports on a research project completed with graduate students of the adult-education programme at the Leuven University in Flanders, Belgium. The research focused on cultural policies and practices in urban contexts that try to facilitate the learning of democratic citizenship in non-formal settings. In the first part we introduce some theoretical notions regarding the relationship between artistic practices in public spaces and pedagogy. The question here is how artistic interventions in urban environments can have an educative effect on people who participate in such experiences. In the second part we interpret some of the changes that take place in the urban context of a provincial city in Flanders and the related cultural policies and practices with the help of the theoretical concepts on public spaces and pedagogy.     

The Role of Bilingualism in Shaping Engineering Literacies and Identities

In this article, we demonstrate ways in which teachers, working within the context of rapidly changing demographics in our country, can create inclusive classroom environments that promote the development of engineering literacies and identities, particularly among bilingual students. We draw on our experience working with two projects funded by the U.S. Department of Education’s Minority Science and Engineering Improvement Program (MSEIP) at a large public university on the U.S.-Mexico border to show how educators can create educational spaces that encourage bilingual students to use their full communicative repertoires in developing engineering discourses and identities. In so doing, we highlight the relationship between bilingualism and disciplinary literacy development; describe how hybrid language practices such as translanguaging can contribute to engineering learning; and highlight the role of identities in disciplinary discourses. The practices illustrated in this article have implications not only for college instructors, but also for teachers at the secondary level.     

Action research for gender equity in a late modern society

This paper discusses how action research could be a useful method in order to work for social justice in societies between the modern and the postmodern. The examples are locally bound, since they emanate from parts of Swedish society. However, by being contextually politically aware of how power rules in a local politcal context and how the local, in different contradictory ways, is a piece in a jigsaw puzzle which trancends local and even national boundaries—the principles for carrying through these action research projects for social justice could be used in other contexts. Theoretically, it draws on feminist poststructural theories and discusses concerns with the normalizing and regulative aspects of dominant discourses especially regarding gender equity. The two concepts ‘moments of normalization’ and ‘moments of equity’, which highlight the motor of the changing process in the bodies of the participants, are useful since they simultaneously highlight the ways in which power rules in local contexts as well as possible and different ways of creating possible and different rules for reaching what could be defined as ‘social justice’. It is argued that by analysing different arenas of practices in these ways the local is not seen as separate from the global.     

A porous,morphing, and circulatory mode of self‐other: decolonizing identity politics by engaging transnational reflexivity

As im/migrant researchers of color working and living in the USA, we begin this article by discussing how our own transnational selves and research have created tensions with the normalized use of socially constructed and theorized categories and differences in US qualitative research practices. We theorize an alternative reflexive mode of conceptualizing a researcher self that can illuminate more contextually engaging understanding and relationships between researcher and researched within our transnational research contexts. We argue that our reflexive approach to researcher self as non‐unitary I, circulatory mode of porous and shifting entities simultaneously fracturing and morphing into each other in relation to its changing webs of relationships and history, can bring different ways of understanding and working with the ever changing and interconnected global‐local cultural, social, and political conditions and contexts of education and research.