Taking Back Teaching: The Professionalization Work of Teacher Activist Organizations

We contribute to the teacher activism literature an understanding of how activist organizations support professionalization processes. We examine how teachers’ involvement in a local activist organization counteracts the de-professionalizing reforms of the standards and accountability movement and fosters the professionalization of teaching. Our findings suggest that the structures of the activist organization provide opportunities for teachers to create and maintain collective knowledge for curricula and practice, sustain their professional commitments to social justice, and build confidence that promotes voice in educational decision-making. We discuss implications for teacher professionalization and identify the need for future studies on the role of teacher activist organizations on teachers, teaching, and the profession.

On the Mis-Education of Teachers of Color: A Letter to Teacher Educators

Although teacher education researchers have long claimed their commitment to successfully preparing teachers to educate students of Color—a growing majority in U.S. schools—notably absent from their attempts are the voices of teachers of Color. This silence often results in pathological portrayals, positioning teachers of Color as the problem while obscuring the pervasive, problematic, and harmful Whiteness of teaching and teacher education. In this context, inspired by James Baldwin’s letter-essays and centering truthtelling as theoretical framework, eight tenured New York City public school teachers of Color and a teacher educator of Color engaged in collective analysis of a truthtelling exercise focused on what practitioners and institutions of teacher education can and should learn from teachers of Color to develop an antidote to the overwhelming Whiteness of teaching and teacher education, which has been shown to disproportionately disadvantage students of Color. Herein, we offer a composite counter-story—a letter to White teacher educators and, in fact, teacher educators of any racial identification who are in any way aligned with protecting and upholding Whiteness—revisiting our own nuanced memories of becoming and being teachers, unveiling teacher education’s epistemic violence, and issuing a call to action.

Contributions of a Professional Development Course to Language Teacher Identity Development: Critical Incidents in Focus

Despite the widely recognized significance of critical incidents (CIs) in teachers’ professional learning, little research has investigated the role of CIs in language teacher identity development. This study attempts to fill this gap by exploring the contributions of a Telegram-based professional development course—framed around CI storying—to the language teacher identity development process of a group of teachers. Data were collected from 10 teachers before, during, and after the course. Data analyses indicated that, before the course, CIs negatively influenced the teachers’ agency and emotions. Participation in the course contributed, however, to the teachers’ enhanced agency and greater emotion regulation. In addition, the course afforded the teachers an opportunity to experience further professional socialization and collegial engagement. Our findings revealed that during the course, the teachers developed greater expertise in storying their CIs and discussed higher order issues relevant to the multiplicity of identity as connected to sociocultural-educational dimensions. These findings suggest that emotions and agency are two significant identity aspects that are profoundly influenced by and influence CIs. Our article closes with a discussion of the implications of embedding CIs in professional development courses to help teachers (re)construct their identities.

Sensemaking of University and District Stakeholders in Implementing a Teacher Residency Policy in Louisiana

A growing body of research has identified teacher residency’s potentials for improving and sustaining preservice teacher learning through a stronger district–university partnership. Drawing on sensemaking perspectives on education policy implementation, this qualitative case study examines how a variety of university and district stakeholders make sense of and implement a state-mandated teacher residency in Louisiana. Findings reveal that stakeholders are primarily making sense of the residency in isolation, leading to incoherent understandings and varied implementation practices. Opportunities to improve stakeholders’ collective sensemaking and collaborative implementation and to optimize the benefits and potentials of teacher residency partnerships are discussed. This study has implications for teacher education policy implementation and continuous inquiry into the complexities of teacher preparation.

Designing for Framing in Online Teacher Education: Supporting Teachers’ Attending to Student Thinking in Video Discussions of Classroom Engineering

Participating in discussions of classroom video can support teachers to attend to student thinking. Central to the success of these discussions is how teachers interpret the activity they are engaged in—how teachers frame what they are doing. In asynchronous online environments, negotiating framing poses challenges, given that interactions are not in real time and often require written text. We present findings from an online course designed to support teachers to frame video discussions as making sense of student thinking. In an engineering pedagogy course designed to emphasize responsiveness to students’ thinking, we documented shifts in teachers’ framing, with teachers more frequently making sense of, rather than evaluating, student thinking later in the course. These findings show that it is possible to design an asynchronous online course to productively engage teachers in video discussions and inform theory development in online teacher education.

How Do Prompts Shape Preservice Teachers’ Reflections? A Case Study in an Online Technology Integration Class

To investigate how prompts shape preservice teachers’ reflections, we examined, in this exploratory case study, the written reflections responding to three types of prompts (standard-based, concept-based, and task-based) of 21 preservice teachers in an online technology integration class. We analyzed these reflections at the sentence level (total 1,503 comments), both quantitatively and qualitatively, using a framework comprising descriptive, rationalistic, and anticipatory dimensions to understand the compositions of reflections generated from each type of prompt and the kinds of teacher abilities demonstrated in each dimension. We found quantitative patterns between prompt types and the reflections generated and emergent themes in each dimension of reflection relating to teacher abilities. We conclude by discussing three prompt design features that appeared to have played an important role in shaping the reflections and suggesting implications and future research directions.

Teacher Leadership for Love, Solidarity, and Justice: The Invisibilized and Contested Practices of Teacher Leaders of Color

Despite widespread acknowledgment of teachers of Color as critical agents of change, white supremacist, colonial, and cis-heteropatriarchal ontologies of “teacher leadership” marginalize the counterhegemonic leadership they embody. Guided by critical leadership and feminist of Color scholarship, I develop and employ an embodied raciolinguistic analysis to examine how a Latina teacher leader of Color facilitated organization-wide action in the educational interests of Black students. My analysis demonstrates that her discursive and embodied practices as a non-Black woman of Color and “official” teacher leader were simultaneously (re)constructed as catalysts and hindrance for racial progress within and across social spaces. Grappling with these possibilities and tensions at interpersonal, institutional, and societal scales, she reflexively adapted her practices to recenter Black leadership while facing professional consequences. Arguing for radical social change by amplifying the multi-faceted and contested nature of counterhegemonic teacher leadership, I offer implications to foster the critical ingenuity needed to lead in love, solidarity, and justice for and among communities of Color.

Responding to Worldview Threats in the Classroom: An Exploratory Study of Preservice Teachers

This study used two training sessions and two focus groups with 17 preservice teachers (aged 20–36) completing their first teaching practicum placement during their Bachelor of Education program at an urban research university in western Canada. The aim was to implement ideas from terror management theory (TMT) during their teaching practicum. Participants explored how to facilitate contentious issues so as to prevent defensive reactions when worldviews clash in the classroom. A dramaturgical analysis identified participant objectives, conflicts, tactics, attitudes, emotions, and subtexts as they explored how to anticipate and avoid worldview and self-esteem threat, navigate tense pedagogical spaces, build capacity for expressing uncomfortable emotions, and diffuse threat with humor. Because difficult emotions are central to teaching potentially polarizing content, participating preservice teachers explored when compensatory reactions might emerge and, as a result, developed their own emotional awareness—TMT became both an experience and a teachable theory.