Transforming Educator Practice Through a Culturally Responsive and Sustaining Pedagogies Rubric

While the value of culturally responsive and sustaining pedagogies in education is largely accepted, how to equip educators to integrate these pedagogies in their practice is far less understood. In this chapter, the authors discuss how teacher education faculty's understanding and implementation of culturally responsive and sustaining pedagogies were strengthened through an iterative and co-constructed process of tenet and rubric development, scaffolded implementation, peer feedback, and collaborative reflection. Drawing from four years of faculty inquiry group work in ongoing professional learning settings, the authors discuss the importance of a localized, evolving central framework which both informed practice and was grounded in praxis. The authors argue for the importance of systematic approaches, including both self-work and engagement with structural inequities, using shared understandings to affect enduring, multi-layered transformation across a large and diverse set of teacher education programs.

Restorying With the Ancestors: Historically Rooted Speculative Composing Practices and Alternative Rhetorics of Queer Futurity

Within literacy, rhetoric, and composition (LRC) studies, composing practices have been studied as an embedded feature of life, one that manifests histories, imagination, and identities through acts of writing. Likewise, in queer LRC studies, the capacity to write with queer rhetorical agency or to recognize the impossibility of composing queer subjectivity has been tied to the living. Scholars have yet to consider with adequacy, however, the ways in which writing is equally bound up with the dead, with ghosts, histories, and ancestors that animate the imagination and attendant composing practices. Tracing the historically rooted speculative composing practices (HRSCPs) of an inquiry group of nine queer composers, this article spotlights queer ancestors as speculative resources for imagining and then composing alternative rhetorics of queer futurity. Specifically, this article details how three queer composers, Coyote (they/them), Helen (she/her), and Margarita (they/them), restory the imagination, happiness, and reality with the ancestors, doing so to challenge the trope of queer unhappy endings attached to realist genres. This article concludes by inviting LRC studies to explore how HRSCPs might be integrated into future research and pedagogy and thereby pursue healing for communities long marginalized within the field.

Reconstructing and Reorganizing Experience: Weaving a Living Philosophy

Background/Context This study contributes to ongoing work in professional learning communities, self-study, and reflection. It offers a structure and a process rooted in a philosophy of practice grounded in various thinkers like Dewey, Rogers, Curran, Freire, Gattegno, Greene, and Carini. Purpose/Objective The purpose of this study is to explore the process of one teacher educator inquiry group that has lasted nearly 30 years, and which has sought to enact Dewey's notion of education, “that reconstruction or reorganization of experience that adds meaning to experience and increases ability to direct the course of subsequent experience.” Research Design Our research design mirrors the reflective inquiry process of our group, that is, how we researched is simultaneously what we researched. The process itself follows a structure for reflection outlined by Dewey in Rodgers. It begins with recollected experiences, descriptions of those experiences, and is followed by a “harvesting of themes,” through analysis and interpretation, to possible modes of “intelligent action.” The process is iterative and continuous. Conclusions Our conclusions go beyond mere descriptions of our process. We come to the realization that, as Greene writes, being “wide-awake” to the particularities of our lives and work; to live intentionally, deliberately, and morally; and to be aware of who and why we are, and are to each other, is essential to a democratic society.

Using a virtual platform for an asynchronous co-operative inquiry

A participatory action research (PAR) study using co-operative inquiry methods was employed to examine the topic ‘spirituality and childbirth’. Co-operative inquiry (CI) reclaims the right of co-researchers to create knowledge from their own lived experience, an approach that works ‘with’ rather than ‘on’ people, valuing individual contributions. Traditionally, CI has been organised synchronously in the same physical location. However, with current events and need for greater global collaboration for divergent/convergent perspectives, an ‘asynchronous’ CI is important to consider. To date, the authors are not aware of any published/unpublished asynchronous co-operative inquiry research projects. This article describes how our inquiry group worked across global regions and time zones meeting online, via emails and discussion boards, and gathered data in an online repository. The outcomes of this inquiry are published elsewhere, here we discuss the novel methods used to support emergence of a modified CI. We offer insight into how our cycles of reflection and action matured and were possible and enhanced through virtual inquiry methods. While technology posed limitations, working asynchronously across time and space enabled rich and complex conversations. An asynchronous modified CI method allows a depth of inquiry to be achieved whilst retaining the purpose of CI.

Inquiry and Participatory Action Research in Primary School

In Jamaica, learner-centered instruction is commended for teaching a curriculum focused on environmental education and sustainable development. This study investigated the potential of participatory action research (PAR) as an inquiry-based instructional method in a sixth-grade Jamaican classroom. Mixed methods compared the academic performance of students between teacher-led and PAR-driven groups, and analyzed key attributes of sustainable development. Though practicing PAR had no significant effect on students’ academic performance, perceived collaboration skills, and interest in science, participants displayed leadership skills, such as self-confidence, commitment, and teambuilding. Moreover, the inquiry group conducted cross-curricular research towards place-based environmental improvement. These assets correspond to the Jamaican educational objective of integrating multiple disciplines and stakeholders in the equation for a sustainable future and warrant a further evaluation of PAR in Jamaican schools.

Applying Social Media to Scaffold University Students’ Inquiry Group Project Work – Theoretical and Practical Implications

Aim/Purpose: This study serves a constructive purpose on the effective use of social media as a technical tool in formal learning at higher education. It outlines practical suggestions for institutions to leverage the participatory design method and refine social media pedagogies. Background: Social media gains widespread usage from the majority of university students worldwide. Educators examine the potential of social media’s affordances in teaching and learning. While the use of social media in formal learning has garnered much interest among educators, the implementation of such pedagogies remains individually motivated rather than institution-wide. Methodology: This research empirically examined university students who took part in inquiry group project work in two courses (undergraduate and postgraduate) under implementation of participatory design approach. It adopted a mixed-method approach by collecting both quantitative and qualitative data to examine their expectations and preferences on social media tools. Contribution: Despite the technology’s potential for facilitating teaching and learning, the effective use of social media in higher education has been a recurring problem for many educators and institutions. This study addresses the deficit and proposes a theoretical framework that consists of student’s own experience and teacher-initiated scaffolding students’ adequate use of social media in formal learning using participatory design approach. Findings: Results indicate that students wanted to use social media to gain knowledge, collaborate, communicate with each other and embraced the implementation of the participatory design approach, which offered them a greater sense of participation and ownership. Furthermore, our research has revealed that despite generally being familiar with social media use in everyday life, students relied at least partially on their lecturer’s guidance in adopting social media in the specific domain of formal learning. Recommendations for Practitioners: To incorporate social media in education, the ultimate goal is to enhance students’ use of social media tools for better and more effective learning. Our study recommends initiating organizational change in universities to the adoption of new pedagogies which allows students’ autonomy and lecturer’s scaffolding support to demonstrate the pedagogy’s positive influence by social media in teaching and learning. Recommendation for Researchers: Researchers could examine and compare the effects by implementing the theoretical framework suggested in this research in different education levels, e.g., secondary school education. The researchers could consider cognitive, psychological, and social factors on incorporating social media into formal learning. Impact on Society: Social media has gained its recognition in everyday lives and academic field; however, the feasibility of social media-assisted pedagogies depends on individual educator solely. The current article provides a new pedagogy that educators can refine by students’ levels of social media proficiency and their learning expectations for institutions from around the world to make the best use of social media as part of formal university education. Future Research: With the rapid development of social media, further studies are worthy to examine the longitudinal impact of the current and the latest social media pedagogy with participatory design in scaffolding university students’ inquiry group project work on potential for use in formal learning and extent to co-create collaboration with lecturers.

Dialogic Teaching during Cooperative Inquiry-Based Science: A Case Study of a Year 6 Classroom

Teachers play a critical role in promoting dialogic interaction in their students. The purpose of this case study was to investigate how one very effective teacher taught two, cooperative, inquiry-based science units to her Year 6 class. In particular, the case study focused on how she used different discourses to capture students’ curiosity in the inquiry-based tasks, provided hands-on activities to enable them to test out their hypotheses and develop explanations for what they found in order to help them become more scientifically literate and have a broader understanding of the role of science in the world in which they live. The results showed that the students engaged constructively with their peers on the inquiry group tasks; they used the correct scientific language to discuss phenomena, make claims, and compared findings. Furthermore, they became more adept at expressing their opinions and providing explanations and justifications for the ‘scientific’ positions they had adopted across the six inquiry-based science lessons; core cognitive practices that support learning. This case study highlights the importance of utilizing both authoritative and dialogic discourse to challenge and scaffold students’ thinking to support enhanced understandings and reasoned argumentation during inquiry-based science. This case study fills a gap in the literature on how teachers can utilize different communicative approaches during inquiry-based science units to promote student engagement and learning.

Collaborative Teacher Inquiry for Inclusive Education

Taking an inquiry approach for professional learning in support of inclusive education is both pragmatic and powerful, although it has certainly not been the norm throughout much of teacher education in North America. Much research in inclusive education has focused on teacher beliefs and practices, school structures, and service delivery models, and such foci often position teachers as technicians, implementing outside experts’ ideas about “best practices,” thus marginalizing educators as mere consumers of research and methods, rather than developers, designers, and architects of inclusive practices. To foster full participation and membership of all learners in their classrooms, teachers often engage in trial and error, puzzle solving, and creativity, to build productive and participatory communities of learning. Although consciousness, criticality, and questioning are the foundation of an inclusive stance, awareness alone does not necessarily generate practices of critical inclusivity. The work of moving recursively from framings (ideological and affective) to specific, embodied practices requires continuous action and reflection, which is well supported by practitioner inquiry. The practice of inquiry requires that teachers engage in persistent, reflective work; take risks; and use failures as points of departure for new learning and teaching approaches. The content of the inquiry, when focused on capacity and inclusivity, has the potential to work against the dominant discourses that marginalize and exclude particular students and populations, whereas the process of inquiry can position teachers as creative, intellectual problem-solvers, thus working against the dominant discourse of teachers as technicians. Inquiry for inclusivity is most often taken up as a collaborative practice, supporting educators to make their problem-solving public, gaining both friendly critique and affirmation. The collaborative inquiry group can also serve as a space for ideological and affective clarification, as striving to design teaching and learning for inclusion involves challenging many of the norms of schooling, including individualism; meritocracy; competition; and sorting, leveling, and ranking students.