Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

9-2024

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Program

Urban Education

Advisor

Anna Stetsenko

Committee Members

Beth Ferholt

Sherry Deckman

Subject Categories

Curriculum and Instruction | Disability and Equity in Education | Elementary Education | Teacher Education and Professional Development

Keywords

Elementary Education, teacher education, refusal, collaborative research methods

Abstract

Though scholars have begun to position youth’s fugitivity, refusal, and disengagement as logical responses to hostile environments, and as part of a larger legacy of Black speculative planning and action, most teachers do not. Elementary teachers, especially in urban contexts, notoriously struggle with “classroom management” and teachers across contexts cite behavior challenges, such as “disruptive” behavior, as the number one challenge facing our schools. In fact, up to 50% of novice teachers leave the profession in the first five years due to students’ behaviors. This dissertation interrogates the common trope of the wayward student who must be controlled. I consider what is lost when students (and teachers) adapt to normative structures of schooling, and I ask what can be built from teachers listening fully to children’s (and teachers’ own) calls for freedom?

In pursuit of the above question, I formed The Emergent Teacher Education Collective (TETEC), a research group composed of four novice teachers (my former education students), myself and a Brazilian post-doctoral student. Using Participatory Design Research and (auto)ethnographic methods, the group met once per month to develop practices, theories, and methods that support the fugitivity, abolition, and resistance already present in classrooms. This dissertation has four main contributions to the field, as exemplified in each of the four articles.

The first article a methodological contribution that I call cascading stories. Cascading stories is a method of data collection and data analysis that developed when participants (subtly) refused to follow my plans and took ownership of the research. I argue that cascading stories connected us with the Indigenous concept of relational accountability, whereby research relationships are paramount. Specifically, cascading stories strengthened three relationships: (1) between participants and the research, (2) between participants and researcher, and (3) between participants and their teaching. I end by urging education researchers to consider moments of tension as opportunities to cede power to participants and build more sustainable futures together.

In the second article I turn to my experiences as a fourth-grade teacher, and argue that false positivity reinforces white supremacy, particularly in math education. After I explore traditional approaches to positivity in psychology and in schools, I use a critical childhood lens to investigate the ways that positivity in schools reinforces normative discourses of children, as learners, innocent or threats, and enshrines racial capitalism. Employing Participatory Design Research and autoethnography, I work with novice teachers to better understand children’s refusal of positivity and transform my earlier theorizations of Black sadness and anxiety in the elementary math classroom. Lastly, I give recommendations for how we might attend to discomfort in the classroom without reinforcing racial capitalism.

In the third article, I begin by asserting that without an early education in the insurmountably of our differences, it would be difficult for our society to perpetuate the myriad violences commonplace in our schools. I pay particular attention to patterns of anti-Blackness, pursuing the question of how a diverse teacher inquiry group might work together across differences to create a generative response to an instance of anti-Blackness in an elementary classroom. Building with legacies of abolition pedagogy, I advocate for Oddkin Pedagogy, an approach to teaching/learning that opens the responsibility for attending to anti-Blackness to people outside of the historical category of the blackened. After discussing how I developed Oddkin Pedagogy alongside an international, multiracial teacher inquiry group, I show how it disrupted white supremacy within my classroom. I put forth Oddkin Pedagogy as a reflexive, emergent, and abolitionist approach that allowed all involved to create solidarity in the face of anti-Blackness and white supremacy.

In the last paper, I locate separability as a source of modern social and ecological catastrophes. In my search for what Denise Ferriera da Silva has called difference without separability, I begin with a discussion of schools as sites of separability, paying particular attention to historical antecedents. Then, I show how education researchers have developed methods to refuse separability by emphasizing the incomplete and affective nature of separability’s antidote - entanglement. In the second half, I build upon and with those methods to investigate: (1) How can a group of teachers better understand separability in schools and children’s efforts to create networks of entanglement? (2) What methods can a group of novice and experienced teachers develop to analyze how children understand and overcome separability in schools? To answer these questions, I have pulled from two meetings from a larger Participatory Design Research project wherein our research group discussed an audio-recording of two children, ages 5 ½ and 18 months, playing school. Through revisiting the recording, storytelling, and story-seeking, we found that children crafted kinship with others across difference and physical space. This study shows the importance of the process of experimenting with entanglement alongside children, even if the children are not physically present.

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