Communities of practice and the elevation of urban elementary teacher discourse about critical pedagogy of place

Children who live in under-resourced communities and attend under-resourced schools deserve access to high-quality teachers and educational opportunities to support their success and well-being. This study emerged from a professional development (PD) for urban teachers working in such schools, to ex...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Cultural studies of science education 2024-09, Vol.19 (2-3), p.417-442
Main Authors: Richmond, Gail, Hunter, Roberta, Tal, Tali, Tukurah, Grace
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Communities of practice
Critical Theory
Education
Educational Opportunities
Elementary School Students
Elementary School Teachers
Neighborhoods
Original Paper
Pedagogy
Professional development
Schools
Science Education
Science Instruction
Social justice
Sociology of Education
Teachers
Teaching
Urban areas
Urban Teaching
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Summary:Children who live in under-resourced communities and attend under-resourced schools deserve access to high-quality teachers and educational opportunities to support their success and well-being. This study emerged from a professional development (PD) for urban teachers working in such schools, to expand educational opportunities for elementary students through outdoor science teaching. Engaging frameworks of communities of practice (CoP) and critical pedagogy of place (CPP), this critical ethnographic study investigates how urban elementary teachers engage in discourse about critical issues of place. Additionally, the investigation seeks to understand how a CoP supports such discourse. The primary data for this study were multiple sets of researcher field notes collected from participant teachers during virtual spring and in-person summer PD. Over the course of the PD, participants shifted from viewing their outdoor teaching spaces with a deficit perspective to an asset-focused one. As they visited one another’s teaching sites, the CoP the teachers were a part of created opportunity for discourse about social justice linked to issues of place within their particular school neighborhoods. The ability of urban elementary teachers to connect social justice to issues of place and to the teaching of science has implications for countering the injustice that characterizes many urban communities in the USA and elsewhere.
ISSN:1871-1502
1871-1510
DOI:10.1007/s11422-024-10221-7