Ramona Cutri

‘Affective polarization’ refers to the amount of negativity that people feel for those who belong to a political party other than their own. This self-study reports on our particular use of a narrative cycle model and documents its validity as a tool for doing the emotional work of exploring contradictions in one’s practice without the pressure of engaging in public emotional discourses. We focused on the contradiction between our intention to teach anti-oppressive teacher education and inadvertently silencing students who exhibited affective polarization. Our narrative inquiry analysis documented patterns of our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that we assert could help improve the practice of anti-oppressive teacher educators from a variety of political leanings and pedagogical orientations responding to affective polarization. They are 1) recognizing the ineffectiveness of persuasion, 2) recognizing a commonality of emotions, and 3) recognizing an ethical commitment to all students. Practically, our narrative cycle model is a tool to inquire into the emotional work of exploring contradictions in one’s practice. Our findings offer a more nuanced understanding of the emotional work involved in responding to affective polarization while enacting anti-oppressive education ideals. Our model also advances a theoretical understanding of how to interrupt the immediacy of time, place, and sociality in the classroom to allow teacher educators to confront their own discomforting emotions. We assert that our narrative cycle tools can help teacher educators turn and face their own emotional and intellectual reactions to affective polarization in the classroom and do so in a manner that upholds the ideals of anti-oppressive teacher education.

This original year-long study by an undergraduate teacher candidate explores the challenges of student investment in relation to issues of identity and emotionality within emotional geographies in teacher education. Personal reflections, analytic memos, and notes were created to capture and explore student investment decisions. Further, we employed both a critical and meta-critical friend to rigorously develop and interrogate themes and interpretations. Findings revealed that decisions to invest in any particular learning context did not merely constitute an intellectual commitment. Rather embodied emotional responses to persons, ideologies, and environments challenged her to make sense of her place in emotional geographies. Her decision-making process involved moving toward investing in learning or presenting a more superficial performance. These decisions depended, in part, on her deliberations of whether the emotional geographies provided opportunities that she perceived would ‘build her’ or ‘break her.’ We assert that learning actively requires students to make decisions about their position, identity and belonging within educational relationships. Attending to embodied emotional work in classroom learning is often understudied, and yet is relevant to issues of power and equity with teacher education. This self-study offers teacher educators insight into the benefits of being aware of students’ emotional work and the potential influence it can have on student decisions to invest in learning. This research contributes a deeper understanding of such emotional work and how self-study involving students can be used as a source of knowledge in teacher preparation programs.

Although mentored undergraduate research has been shown to deepen student engagement across various disciplines, this type of extended learning opportunity is not a prominent feature of research and practice in teacher education. Our article addresses this gap by analyzing the experiences and growth of a group of five preservice teachers engaged in a mentored undergraduate research experience in several sections of an introductory critical multicultural education course. Specifically, we examined how pre-service teachers’ personal, academic, and professional engagement with critical multicultural education is impacted when they are positioned as researchers and receive additional training outside the traditional class format. Our findings indicate that their involvement as student co-researchers fostered a new awareness, sensitivity, and emotional investment in issues of social justice beyond what they gained in their introductory multicultural education course. Pre-service teachers described navigating personal relationships with new awareness and sensitivity and adjusting future plans in accordance with their deeper understanding and commitment to educational equity. We argue that mentored research opportunities are an innovative way to address professor/student power differentials in teacher education research and offer a unique model of critical multicultural teacher education that promotes deep engagement with issues beyond the classroom setting.

This mixed-methods study was designed to measure and elaborate constructs of faculty online readiness from pre- COVID-19 pandemic literature. Bringing together the validation of a scale to measure these constructs and insights from a focus group, findings suggest that the negative connotations of risk-taking and making mistakes while learning to teach online seem to have been mitigated by a combination of affective factors such as humility, empathy, and even optimism. Teacher educators explained that transitioning online in a context of a crisis contorts normal longitudinal perceptions of preparation and readiness. This new sense of temporality was connected to unexpected benefits of bringing them into partnership with their students. However, quantitative and qualitative results are interpreted to show that assessing students equitable access to online learning and managing the demands of scholarship and university-based and academic community service duties are areas in need of attention from professional development designers and policy makers.

Building on scholarship that establishes the discourse of individuality as a typical response to critical multicultural education, this study examines emergent discourses from 175 teacher candidates in their explanations of personal privilege. Open codes were applied to end-of-semester written responses from pre-service teachers asking them to explain the unearned privileges in their lives. Data was coded with attention to ideologies and meaning making. Analysis reveals three discourses present in the teacher candidates’ written responses explaining their personal privilege: 1) a discourse of personal achievement relying on an ideology of meritocracy (n=12); 2) a discourse of inheritance that references an ideology of luck (n=118); and 3) a discourse of systemic inequality that begins to evidence more critical ideologies (n=45). These three distinct emerging discourses of individuality drawn on a general discourse of individuality in varying levels. Yet, empirical evidence from this study extends previous research related to a discourse of individuality by documenting additional discourses and ideologies in how students grapple with privilege. We assert that recognizing the discourse of inheritance that emerges in our study is particularly important because, in addition to representing the largest responses from students, it has practical and theoretical implications for teacher educators.

This reflexive inquiry explores a teacher educators efforts to design opportunities for students to use their knowledge of social media and the internet to contribute content to their online critical multicultural education course. Findings identify steps critical multicultural education pedagogues can take to design such opportunities: 1) identify contradictions in their practice; 2) take pedagogical risks; and 3) work with chronic tensions.<b> Designing formal opportunities for students to identify and use content from social media and the internet as learning resources and curricular content for critical multicultural education shifted the power relations in the course. </b>These results demonstrate the potential of critical pedagogy online to create new practices of shared knowledge construction, expertise, and authority and address the call for research into the potential of online environments to foster critical pedagogy.

Mandates for technology integration (TI) in teacher education courses continue to gain momentum. However, most teacher educators are not trained in the practices of instructional technology and, when mandated or strongly encouraged to do TI, they can face challenges and even crises of practice and identity. Like other teacher educators facing the seemingly inevitable advancement of TI in teacher education, we were excited, yet cautious, about a program for faculty development on blended learning course development (FDBL). This article reports the self-study of our experiences and the subsequent designing and offering of our courses in a blended learning format. We situate our systematic account of our practice within larger research considerations of how self-study of teacher education methodology can shed light on digital practices. This self-study provides a rich description of how teacher educators can integrate technology as a prolonged and iterative endeavor as opposed to a one-time project that does not fit in with their practice. Three major themes emerge from our study: (1) authentic pedagogical problems and content-area expertise, (2) learning theories and pedagogical beliefs, and (3) design iterations vs. summative evaluation. These three themes provide touchstones for teacher educators to consider when incorporating technology in their situated practice while remaining true to their content area and learning theory commitments. This self-study illustrates the ways in which the characteristics of self-study methodology actually facilitate teacher educators authentic engagement with TI.

This study examined how our non-personhood experiences (NPHEs) contributed to our teacher educator identity process. We took up exploration of these experiences, which were very painful for us, not as entre into victimhood, but because we wanted to learn something about how, in the face of such experiences, we could engage with these troubling interactions in order to renew our commitment to our work as teacher educators in the academe. During the analysis process, we considered our stories along four overlapping dimensions (1) our Selves in our own story, 2) others in the story, 3) colleagues not in the story, and 4) non-colleagues and others not in the story. A framework for looking at our NPHEs resulted that allows teacher educators to attend to students needs while simultaneously reasserting their own teacher educator identities in more honest and vulnerable ways. Analyzing NPHEs has the potential to help teacher educators engage and invite students to recognize teacher educators personhood and therefore better position them to recognize the personhood of their future students.

This study describes how 72 fifth grade Latina/Latino students express their sense of belonging to their ethnic group. The purpose of this study is to help teachers gain specific understanding of the ways that preadolescent Latina/Latino students express belonging to their ethnic group, in order to become more effective at implementing culturally relevant and inclusive pedagogy. Students in this study spoke in concrete and descriptive ways about ethnic food, their language and their families when asked about the ?ethnic things? in their lives. Findings from this study underscore the importance of listening for expressions of ethnicity among pre-adolescents in order to better support ethnic identity development, as well as school and family connections, for ethnic minority students at the crucial age of transition.

The urgent need to prepare more mainstream classroom teachers to work with English language learners (ELLs) prompts innovative approaches to teacher preparation. One such innovation, use of technology, can prepare a large number of teachers efficiently. Yet quantity does not ensure quality. Focusing only on teaching strategies may diminish attention to developing positive dispositions toward ELLs. Field participation has been shown to be prospective teachers? most influential experience in developing attitudes toward ELLs, but neither early classroom experiences nor home visits with ELLs are always logistically possible. This article explores possibilities for pre-service teachers coming to know and developing positive dispositions toward an ELL and her family through a multimedia technological intervention. Using design based research (DBR) methodology and narrative inquiry, this article reports qualitative findings that suggest the positive influence of using digital stories in teacher education programs.

Purpose: This narrative inquiry explores one teacher educators curriculum-making process (Connelly & Clandinin, 1992) to elicit teacher candidates emotional and analytic engagement with multicultural education.
Approach: Three semesters of fieldnotes, from one teacher educators planning and execution of a blended learning format multicultural teacher education course, with face to face classes and asynchronous instruction through technology, document her struggles to create a blended learning curriculum model that explicitly addresses ways to impact teacher candidates dispositions toward multicultural issues.
Findings: The inquiry raises hopeful questions about the possibilities of using stories and technology in a multicultural teacher education blended learning delivery setting. Additionally, the inquiry highlights fruitful tensions involved in making space for the stories of teacher candidates from both nondominant and dominant culture to become part of the curriculum of the class.
Research Implications: Narrative inquirys application as an empirical research method in the field of multicultural education is demonstrated. Highlighted particularly is the capacity in narrative inquiry methods to document places of tension and inclusion in multicultural teacher education.
Value: Awareness of the potential of storied ways of approaching diversity and the benefits of negotiating the tensions involved are of value to teacher educators exploring curriculum-making in a blended learning format. Blended learning is reconceptualized beyond the blending of face-to-face and technologically mediated class sessions to include a notion of blending planned and lived curriculum and public and private learning opportunities.

In contrast to the common deficit approach, this self-study explores the relationship between the funds of knowledge possessed by people of poverty and their development of professional identity in academia. All of the authors have moved beyond conditions of financial poverty, but all find that the mental conditions of poverty persist. We assert that select skills and dispositions developed in conditions of material poverty helped us navigate graduate school and continue to productively inform, yet complicate, the development of our professional academic identities. We tease apart the myth of meritocracy and identify the value of transferable funds of knowledge developed in poverty. We document how our own practices have changed as a result of recognizing our poverty funds of knowledge.

Significant research and ongoing inquiry highlight the importance of understanding and recognizing the development of identities and beliefs among teachers. These studies use techniques of reflection on the past or present to elucidate the developmental process of teacher identities and beliefs and their impact on the profession. Based on this research, the development of teacher identities and beliefs commence during childhood. Yet studies have depended on reflection rather than the actual accounts children provide concerning their emerging development of teacher identities and beliefs from their perspective. This study uses qualitative methods. Through the analysis of focus groups and individual interviews findings about the identities and beliefs held by fifth-grade students who plan to become teachers emerged. Revealing the early developing identities of future teachers provides necessary insight into the emerging curricular needs of teacher education programs.

This qualitative study investigated the lived experiences of women working in higher education while quarantined with their children at home in order to examine how motherhood and scholarship operate within institutions to constrain, regulate, and limit mothering and scholaring. The research question was: What are the factors that constructed and constrained the experiences of academics who were quarantined with their children full-time during the COVID-19 pandemic? We examined this using a reflexive narrative methodology. Twenty-four motherscholars responded to a computer-based survey with open-ended questions encouraging participants to share their unique stories. Purposive and convenience sampling was employed to obtain a diverse and representative sampling of women that included marginalized groups such as women of color and women who are sexual orientation and gender minorities. Key themes identified include division of labor, self care, privilege, socialized gender roles, feelings about partners, boundaries, safety, parenting, privacy, and impact on career/productivity. Focusing on participants personal experiences of the interaction between privilege (or lack thereof) and the interruption of established systems provides greater insight into how socialized gender roles are intensified during pandemic conditions. The findings provide further insight into factors that produce and constrain their experiences, contributing to a better understanding of how group privilege operates at the individual level.

In this systematic review, we explore the contribution of S-STEP research to the larger conversations in teacher education research. We seek to synthesize the assertions for action and understanding that have emerged in response to the Zeichner paradox (Berry & Loughran, 2004), identifying how S-STEP methodology integrates with other research on teacher education, and the unique contributions it is poised to make. This project reviews and synthesizes evidence that S-STEP research can and does contribute to the empirically-based knowledge of teacher education. In this review of studies reported in <i>Studying Teacher Education, </i>we explore the knowledge contributions of S-STEP to the field of teacher education and integrate the results of S-STEP studies with other research on teacher education.

Online courses are mainstream throughout higher education. This pattern has been accelerated, temporarily or permanently, due to the coronavirus pandemic (Allen & Seaman, 2016; Arum & Stevens, 2020; Garrison, 2011). Tenure-track and contingent facultys willingness to teach online serves students, but little research critiques the forces that produce and constrain facultys efforts. Even the most current discussions of faculty readiness lack a strong grounding in criticality. Without such a critical orientation, the power and equity issues involved in the higher education marketplace of online teaching cannot be adequately examined. This critical integrated literature review of 44 studies documents themes of the affective dimensions and identity disruption surrounding facultys readiness to teach online and explores their professional vulnerability. Structural and cultural forces that produce and constrain facultys experiences transitioning to online teaching emerged from the analysis. This conceptualization of faculty readiness provides a foundation upon which to theorize facultys equitable experiences of online teaching.

This narrative inquiry explores how three mothers who are also educators can preserve and pass on their values and commitments developed from poverty and working class negotiate their cross class identities while living a curriculum of moral education with backgrounds to their children who are growing up upper upper middle class. Their narrative explores the concepts qualities of intimacy empathy and altruism intimacy emerge from their stories as as means of learning from and about others who have differences. Examining the ecology of mothers from poverty/working class backgrounds who are now academics raising their own children in upper middle class homes can explicate how ways to foster cross -class identities can be fostered in the home setting to that encourage awareness of inequities and promote learning oriented toward social justice needed in home and school settings. The narratives highlight opportunities for researchers and educators to move across cultures and illustrate how tensions between cultures can be held open for meaning making rather than assuming that people only have one class identity. The approaches and strategies of living a moral education curriculum chronicled in their stories offer a developmentally sensitive model of moral education that could, with modification, inform approaches to educating critical class-conscious educators. Future research is called for to further explore the impact of race on practices of moral education and how the types of relationships necessary for moral authority can be fostered within the confines of academia. Implications for morally educating predominately white, middle class educators are outlined.

Until recently, most teacher reflectivity work has only considered teachers? biographical or sociopolitical positionality as influential factors and has been criticized for not focusing reflectivity on issues of race, culture, or spirituality. This study uses narrative inquiry methods to focus the reflective process specifically on issues of race, culture, and spirituality by exploring how pre-service teachers bring together the rhetoric of their spiritual beliefs with the ideals of transformative multicultural education. Sometimes, their spiritual beliefs supported and extended their understanding of the transformative multicultural education curriculum, and in other instances, the process is complicated by their spiritual beliefs. However, the explicit bringing together of their private spiritual beliefs with the public curriculum of transformative multicultural education did prompt deep reflection about their own beliefs and the curriculum.