Responsive, Locally-Relevant Coaching: Supporting STEM Teachers' Learning of Justice-Oriented Pedagogies

Abstract

Despite growing calls for teaching that is justice-oriented, such as culturally sustaining pedagogy, social justice mathematics, and anti-racist teaching, mechanisms and theories for supporting STEM teachers’ learning of such pedagogies remain underspecified. Most studies, of short duration and occurring in preservice teacher education programs, inadvertently miss the role of context and meaning systems in shaping teachers’ learning, severely limiting what little theory we have. To address this gap, this dissertation capitalizes on a research-practice partnership and leverages responsive, locally-relevant coaching and formative feedback in a social design experiment, with the overarching aim of understanding how experienced STEM teachers can be supported in learning justice-oriented pedagogies. Taking a situative perspective and using ethnographic methods to capture teachers’ emic meaning-making, I use constant comparative analytic methods to produce grounded theory of teachers’ learning of justice-oriented pedagogies. In Paper 1 (Marshall & Buenrostro, under review), we critically review the literature to illuminate what we currently know about mathematics teacher coaching, and to highlight studies’ contributions and limitations in order to inform future work. In Paper 2, I examine learning opportunities in a case of video-based coaching to support a teachers’ integration of social justice and mathematics. In Paper 3, I investigate how video-based coaching can shape a mathematics teacher’s learning to disrupt racialized patterns of exclusion in the classroom. Together, these findings suggest that video-based coaching can provide fruitful representations of problems of practice and rich resources for teachers’ collaborative learning. Moreover, they suggest that coaches leveraging of teachers’ problems of practice in a video-based coaching model can lead to meaningful changes in teachers’ pedagogy.