Decolonizing Transcultural Teacher Education through Participatory Action Research

Dialogue, Culture, and Identity

Jean Kirshner, George Kamberelis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000408782
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Professional Development

This volume describes a Participatory Action Research (PAR) project involving educators from Belize and the U.S. to illustrate the critical role of shared dialogue in transnational teacher education.

First identifying issues which inhibited the success of formerly didactic training delivered to Belizean teachers by U.S. educators, this volume documents the transformational impact of a shift to collaborative training approaches and uses first-person accounts from Belizean and U.S. stakeholders to illustrate their successes. Chapters powerfully illustrate that by engaging in Freirean-like dialogue and building relationships based on a mutual understanding of the cultural and historical context, as well as the identity of educators involved, partners are better able to engage in effective transnational pedagogical collaboration. Particular attention is paid to the importance of acknowledging the post-colonial setting and unique positionality of teachers in Belize.

This text will benefit researchers, academics, and educators with an interest in action research and teacher research, multicultural education, and continued professional development in particular. Those interested in teacher training, education research, and international and comparative education will also benefit from this book.

1 Belize Education Project

Professional Development across Cultures

Chapter Overview

In this chapter we describe the history of coming to work with educators in Belize, Central America. We discuss our difficulties, negotiations, and breakthroughs in enacting effective professional development across cultural lines of difference. Specifically, we discuss our initial focus on materials and instructional programs, the difficulties we encountered with this approach, and a shift to focus on leveling power relations, building trust, and cultivating relationships. As it turned out, this shift was essential for paving the way to sustainable change. Finally, we argue for the importance of this shift for successful professional development in intercultural contexts.

Jean’s Story: Looking Beyond, Becoming Disoriented

Before Jean ever entered a Belizean classroom in 2007, the sense of urgency for literacy instruction was already resonating within her. In the paragraphs that follow, she shares her experience from her perspective in the first person.

I had corresponded with a principal via email who informed me that the students’ reading levels in her building were in crisis. She asked me to help the teachers learn how to teach reading more effectively. As soon as I entered their classrooms for the first time, I was struck by the lack of material resources, such as textbooks, trade books, and school supplies. The singular use of whole group instruction without formative assessment and differentiated learning and teaching also caught my attention. Finally, the apparent challenge of reading competencies among parents and other adults in the entire community was noticeable.

My initial work involved gathering material resources, such as books and pencils, along with bringing programs for assessing and differentiating instruction for emergent readers. Yet, I soon discovered that our shared desire to enhance Belizean elementary students’ literacy might be hampered by the reality that teachers from Belize and teachers from the United States inhabited very different national and educational cultures. More significantly, I realized I was stepping into a sociopolitical context still informed by colonial beliefs and dispositions. Additionally, realizing that my Belizean colleagues had their own unique histories, assumptions, and practices, I became more aware of my own. As I reflected on the various differences between us, I realized that old and deeply held assumptions about many things held by both Belizean educators and myself would have to be disrupted, and new ways of thinking, being, and acting would have to be imagined and enacted collaboratively.

My Belizean colleagues and I shared a desire to transform instructional practice to enhance literacy for our students, but our visions issued from two vastly different cultures – one dripping with the residual effects of colonialism, the other with colonizing tendencies, whether inadvertent or not. Within this context, we had very different life stories; our work was situated within different educational and political histories; we were enabled and constrained by different cultural forces. To co-create effective and sustainable new practices, my colleagues in Belize and my colleagues in the United States would have to become deeply committed allies. To do this, we would all have to become vulnerable to each other. We would have to work toward decolonizing pedagogies, and in this, be deliberate in our dialogue, in sharing our life stories, and in sharing our lifeworlds.

Birth and History of Belize Education Project

My first trip to Belize in 2007 was with a medical mission. It was during that mission that I connected with a school, a principal, and a handful of teachers near the hospital where the medical team was working. As I stepped back onto the airplane and lifted off the steamy runway back to Colorado, I began to visualize a lifelong commitment to my colleagues in the classrooms of Belize. I co-founded Belize Education Project with other members of the medical mission and another teacher, which became a nonprofit organization in 2008. The specifics about Belize Education Project can be found at https://www.belizeeducationproject.org/.

During the early years of my work in Belize (2007–2014), I gathered teams of elementary school teachers, principals, and professors from the United States to join me once a year in conducting professional development on literacy education (mostly reading) in Belize. My colleagues from the United States and I increased the scope of our work from one school to four schools. During each annual visit, we brought our very best resources and strategies. By 2014, over 50 educators from the United States had joined me in my travels to Belizean classrooms. Additionally, each year the Belize Education Project brought educators from Belize – teachers, principals, and members of the Belize Ministry of Education – to work and learn in Colorado classrooms.

Although we had changed some surface-level instructional strategies and reconfigured some aspects of classroom environments in the first seven years, the work felt superficial and unsustainable. Despite all these years of working together, teachers from Belize and the United States still inhabited widely separate worlds with respect to thinking about the nature and functions of literacy, teaching dispositions, and instructional practices. These disconnects caused me to seek out new ways of understanding and working in Belize. Ultimately, it led me to work with Dr. George Kamberelis at Colorado State University. Our work together caused me to shift my ways of working with my Belizean colleagues to a more Freirean (1970/2015) approach.

Being Located within Professional Development Work across Cultural Lines of Difference

A few years into this work, I realized that my own positionality was complex. As a teacher and researcher, I was both an outsider and a partial insider within the community of Belizean educators. As an outsider, my education had been delivered to me with ease and with an unwavering assumption that it was part of my birthright. The economic and personal realities of a resource-rich life created perspectives and assumptions that will always be a part of me. My interviews, data collection strategies, analyses, and interpretations were permanently bound to viewing my colleagues’ life stories at least partially through this lens.

In some significant ways, I was also an insider in that I, too, am a teacher who, like my Belizean colleagues, found joy and purpose in teaching young people to read and write, and to develop as citizens within school communities. I, too, found value and purpose in literacy and in lifting my eyes to the future through the students placed in the stewardship of my classroom. This positionality was foundational in becoming a committed ally to my Belizean brothers and sisters.

As both an insider and outsider in this complex, intercultural space, I began to understand that my colleagues and I must come to understand each other and to become vulnerable to each other and together. This led to an epiphany of sorts during which I began to understand, if only partially, that building relationships had to be central to my work and that this might happen by engaging in Freirean-like dialogue, sharing our life stories, and sharing our lifeworlds. All of these activities acted as constitutive forces that created a new and forceful current, which empowered all of us to operate more effectively in a kind of “third space” (Bhabha, 1994) constituted at the intersection of vastly different life experiences and cultural forces. In this “third space” we could begin to negotiate our positionalities, which were in constant flux, albeit sometimes in almost imperceptible ways.

Birth and Purpose of This Particular PAR Project: Our Collective Story

Because we discuss dimensions and experiences of many people both from Belize and the United States involved in BEP work from here on out, we now shift the narrative voice to the first-person plural. Given our location within this project, along with differences inherent in our intercultural context, it became clear that if our work together could enhance literacy instruction and increase literacy levels in Belize, then educators from both Belize and the United States would need to find a way to understand each other more fully and to develop shared goals for our work. We realized we would need to collaborate as equals across cultural boundaries to find common, hybrid solutions, and we wondered if we could transform who we were and the social-educational spaces we created together by working more intentionally to try to level power relations by engaging in more Freirean-like dialogue, by sharing our life stories with vulnerability, and by becoming more attuned to each other’s lifeworlds. We also wondered whether these actions would enhance the effectiveness and the sustainability of literacy education in classrooms both in Belize and the United States. Participatory Action Research (PAR) appeared to be the most productive approach for our professional development efforts and research related to it.

Developmental History of This Particular PAR Project

As all of us traveled back and forth between classrooms in Colorado and Belize, it became clear that PAR was a good choice. As we engaged in this approach through more Freirean-like dialogue, sharing life stories and sharing lifeworlds, or what Schwandt (2015) called “the everyday worlds” (p. 185) of each other’s lives. We all began to notice that not only could transformation occur, but it was also occurring as colleagues from both Belize and the United States became vulnerable enough to understand each other’s communities, classroom realities, practices, assumptions, and visions for literacy. We began to notice transformations not only in our newly constructed spaces of collaborative activity, but also in our co-created professional development, and ultimately in our ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables
• About the Authors
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1: Belize Education Project: Professional Development across Cultures
• Section One: Introducing the Study: Purpose, Context, and Method
• Section Two: Findings and Discussion: Foregrounding Relationships in Professional Development
• Section Three: Implications for Research and Practice
• Index