Exploring Professional Development Opportunities for Teacher Educators

Promoting Faculty-Student Partnerships

Leah Shagrir, Smadar Bar-Tal

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000410563
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Focusing on the partnerships and collaborations between teacher educators and students with regards to faculty members' professional development, contributors from around the world provide insight into professional development opportunities in the context of teaching and collaborating with students. Contributions from these distinguished scholars come from a broad range of countries and cultures to ensure that the presented studies reveal rich information about diverse systems of teacher education.

The studies presented in the book demonstrate how these faculty student partnerships can significantly assist faculty members to develop professionally and produce benefits and impacts on their professional identity. Providing ideas and tools aimed at teacher educators around the world, this book explores partnerships and cooperation as a tool to lead to development and ultimately promotion.

This book is a must-read for all researchers, teacher educators and lecturers looking to expand their knowledge of partnerships with students in higher education.

1

Living and learning partnerships in teacher education

Alison Cook-Sather

Introduction

Teacher education as partnership is a way of life as well as a way of learning in the Bryn Mawr/Haverford education programme. Our particular ways of life and learning strive to support reciprocally educative partnerships for all involved. They thereby expand professional development to be a shared as well as an individual experience that fosters capacity building across the lifespan and contexts and that works toward equity in education. We structure, enact and foster partnership by conceptualising school- and community-based educators, secondary students, undergraduate students and ourselves as instructors of college-based education courses both as teacher educators and as learners educated by one another. We have developed this approach to teacher education and professional development over the last 26 years – through and as partnership.

In this chapter, I first describe our context, our programme and my role, and I provide a working definition of partnership. I then present the partnerships among all the participants listed above to illustrate our education programme’s way of living and learning. Throughout the chapter I draw on scholarship through which I and others have analysed this work to reflect on the premises and practices of our particular form of partnership in teacher education. I conclude with recommendations regarding how to develop and sustain such an approach.

Our context, our programme and my roles

Bryn Mawr and Haverford Colleges are two small, liberal arts, postsecondary institutions in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States, located on the land of the Lenape, 14 miles outside of Philadelphia. Each enrols approximately 1,300 undergraduates – Bryn Mawr also enrols 260 graduate students – and both seek diversity in their student bodies. Historically a women’s college, Bryn Mawr currently enrols 37% White, 33% students of colour (including African-American, Asian-American, Latino/a, Native American, Pacific Islander and Multiracial) and 23% international (with 7% who choose not to identify); as a co-educational institution, Haverford enrols 56.7% White, 12% Asian, 9.49% Hispanic or Latino, 6.87% Black or African-American, and 2.62% two or more races. Both colleges have high teaching and research expectations for faculty and low student-to-faculty ratios, provide a flexible curriculum that encourages exposure to multiple disciplines, and are known for supporting student autonomy and self-governance together with strong cultures of faculty governance.

The Bryn Mawr/Haverford education programme was created in 1992 with a focus solely on secondary teacher certification and accredited by the state of Pennsylvania to certify in 11 subject areas. Over the years, we have expanded the programme to include two options for undergraduates enrolled at Bryn Mawr and Haverford Colleges, as well as students who have graduated from these colleges and wish to continue or return to complete secondary certification as post-baccalaureate (post-bac) students. One option is a minor in educational studies leading to secondary certification, completed alongside a major in the discipline in which students plan to teach. This option includes six courses, all with a field placement – or what we conceptualise as partnership – component, plus a semester of student teaching. On average, five to ten students complete this option each year. The second option is a minor in educational studies that prepares undergraduates for a wide variety of careers and commitments including and beyond classroom teaching. This option includes six courses, all with a partnership component, and a range of capstone courses. We consider both of these options forms of teacher education since, broadly conceived, virtually any role graduates will play will involve teaching and learning. Typically, around 20 students complete this option each year.

From 1994 through 2006, I served as director of the Bryn Mawr/Haverford education programme, and I have taught in the programme for 26 years. While continuing to teach in the programme, I have also, since 2006, served as the director of our teaching and learning institute and its signature programme, students as learners and teachers, which supports pedagogical partnerships between faculty and undergraduates not enrolled in those faculty members’ courses. As director of both programmes, I have embraced student teacher partnership as a premise – between secondary students and pre-service teachers in our education programme and between undergraduates and college faculty in our teaching and learning institute (Cook-Sather, 2010) as well as with school- and community-based educators. My colleagues in the education programme – including the director, faculty, staff and students – have built on and expanded partnership into the way we live and learn throughout all aspects of the Programme. I draw on their vision and, in some cases, their words as well as my own throughout this chapter.

Our working definition of partnership

Partnership as we conceptualise it in the Bryn Mawr/Haverford education programme strives to enact mutual accountability and inspiration through ‘a collaborative, reciprocal process’ of teaching and learning whereby ‘all participants have the opportunity to contribute equally, although not necessarily in the same ways, to curricular or pedagogical conceptualization, decision making, implementation, investigation, or analysis’ (Cook-Sather et al, 2014, pp. 6–7). Key to this definition is the premise that each participant brings identities, experiences and expertise that make their contributions equally valuable, equally important and equally necessary.

In our programme, we recognise and work against the systemic inequities and structural forms of violence – often aligned with histories and structures of anti-Black racism, together with misogyny, ableism, anti-gay bias, anti-Muslim bias and other intersectional identity-based oppressions – through which postsecondary (and K-12) education harms students (and others) (Love, 2019). We work against how such harms are effected in schools, with reference to defining who is intelligent, capable and worthy of success and how the myth of meritocracy is reinforced (Cohen & Lesnick, 2012). Our form of partnership strives to redress epistemic, affective and ontological harms (de Bie et al., 2021) and the ‘spirit-murder of dark children’ (Love, 2019, p. 38) in schools, and it works to support education justice and sustained creativity.

Such partnership work and the commitment to greater equity and justice it strives to realise requires reconceptualising who a teacher educator is and what constitutes professional development. We consider school- and community-based educators, secondary students, undergraduate students and ourselves as instructors of college-based education courses all to be teacher educators, all to be learners and all to be benefiting from the professional development that partnerships with one another constitute. In these ways we expand professional development beyond the individualistic into a shared as well as an individual experience that fosters capacity building across the lifespan and contexts and works toward equity in education.

Partnerships in teacher education

Each of the participants in our approach to teacher education brings an identity and a set of lived experiences that constitute expertise that is informed by and contributes to the professional development of other participants involved. The structures and practices we create in our effort to enact teacher education as partnership support but do not ensure the success of those efforts. Ongoing learning and unlearning are necessary, as are ongoing communication and revision.

I introduce each group of partners below by role, but individuals within these groups gain and contribute in their own unique ways. It is also the case that there are overlaps and complexities among these groups. For instance, school- and community-based educators overlap with experienced classroom teachers, and undergraduate students are differently positioned in relation to secondary students and to college faculty. Such overlaps and complexities of roles and responsibilities are typical of pedagogical partnership and, while sometimes challenging, contribute to its richness and generativity.

School- and community-based educators as partners

For our introductory, required and elective courses, we work in partnership with school- and community-based educators, including a number of graduates of our colleges who have expanded or developed educational programmes in the vicinity. The educators in these contexts create opportunities for undergraduate students enrolled in our courses to work alongside them, supporting the learning and growth of the younger students and other community members who join the programmes, and develop themselves as educators. I offer our introductory course as an example.

Our introductory course, co-taught by an education programme faculty member and the programme’s Coordinator of Cross-Institutional Learning and Certification Officer, is called Community Learning Collaborative: Practicing Partnership (CLC). In this course, school- and community-based educators serve as ‘CLC co-educators’ who work in a variety of contexts and constitute a network that supports and also goes beyond the course. Undergraduates enrolled in this course are invited to understand and experience learning and teaching as reciprocal, mutually informing processes through partnership within and among various contexts. The CLC co-educators who partner with us includes the director of a programme called Common Space, a shared space where people of all ages, races, abilities, ethnicities and economic backgrounds make connections and cross boundaries; the director of Bethel Academy, a volunteer-based multicultural learning centre dedicated to offering free after-school programmes for children grades K–8; two teaching artists working in somatic traditions; teachers in more traditional school settings who teach math and science; and more.

An undergraduate student enrolled in CLC articulated the challenge such a partnership approach poses and offered a glimpse of the kind of growth in understanding of teaching and learning such work can foster:

The challenge of putting myself out there, to be ready for however the kids responded, and just going with it … changed my perspective on what good facilitation can look like … It doesn’t always have to be executed to a tee, and often isn’t, and depends more on how the students respond and how I, as an educator, can create fruitful activities and conversation based off of that. I grew to see myself as an educator as hinging on my responsiveness to the students (or those around me) in the moment, rather than how well my plan was executed.

This undergraduate student enacted and affirmed partnership as an approach with these young students – all of them engaging, responding, revising and re-engaging – rather than seeing teaching as a one-way delivery from teachers to learners of pre-planned experiences and information. Through this collaborative approach, undergraduates learn to regard working with professional mentors as partnership instead of as ‘helping’ or judging or using the field site as a place to test out what they learn in the college classroom. Rather than conceptualising this work only as a form of apprenticeship, this partnership approach supports undergraduates in conceptualising teaching and learning as co-creation from the outset of their teacher education.

This partnership approach also affords the CLC co-educators a unique opportunity for individual and collective professional development. Through dialogue with the undergraduate students, the experienced educators benefit from hearing undergraduates discuss how a particular theory or example of practice explored in the college-based course might play out in that experienced educator’s context, or how that context helps the undergraduates understand and work to bridge what is often a gap between theory and practice. CLC co-educators talk about how unusual it is for them to interact professionally and learn with people in such a wide range of work roles, since professional development for educators tends to be highly siloed. CLC also affords educators not working in higher education a context in which to do that, such as through sharing in syllabus design and lesson planning, thereby bringing their expertise to bear on higher education teaching and learning. Finally, being invited to take on a range of co-educator roles, including speaking on panels and facilitating small groups in the college-based course, mentoring students in their workplaces, and having the opportunity to think about teaching and learning across these contexts, constitute unusual individual and collective forms of professional development. Positioning the mentors as co-educators in these ways disrupts the hierarchy that college instructors are one kind of expert and practising educators another, plain and simple.

Partnership work such as this, structured into the very first course undergraduates take and sustained throughout their coursework, transforms ‘field placements’ into learning and teaching partnerships and supports work for education justice and sustained creativity through partnership. Typically, ‘field placement’ defines the field generically, and sets it up as a kind of data source for students rather than a mutually accountable relationship. Reconceptualising field placements as partnerships requires both unlearning established ways of thinking about education and creating new ways to engage. As one undergraduate enrolled in the course put it:

I have been s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Preface and acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Living and learning partnerships in teacher education
• 2. Professional development of teacher educators occurring as a result of working with student teachers: Literature review
• 3. Developing (as) critically reflective practitioners: Linking pre-service teacher and teacher educator development
• 4. Student teachers creating space for teacher educators’ reflection and professional development
• 5. The silent revolution in teacher education
• 6. Reflections on establishing a student–staff partnership in Irish university-based teacher education
• 7. Teacher educators and student teachers working as partners to improve the effectiveness of modelling: A professional learning journey for the teacher educators
• 8. How does working with and mentoring student teachers shape teacher educators’ professional identity?: A case from Turkey
• 9. Teacher educators and student teachers’ international experiences: Mentoring changes, challenges and opportunities
• 10. Evaluating professional development of teachers educators: Analysis of pedagogical experience
• 11. Narrative pedagogies in cultivating teacher educators’ professional development
• 12. Studying the evaluative views of students as a tool for professional development of teacher educators
• 13. Promoting research activity with student teachers as professional development for teacher educators
• Index