Abstract
This paper presents a first iteration of the TCOOL project as a design experiment in the education of teachers for high poverty, urban schools. The TCOOL Project embodies a new vision for the professional education of teachers that engages schools and universities in deep partnership designed to support the preparation and on-going learning of teachers. Expansive learning theory as described by Engeström and his colleagues is used to probe the opportunities for learning about teaching that TCOOL provides to practitioners in schools and universities. We found that the expansive learning theory enabled us to see that, even in its pilot run, the learning processes manifested throughout by participants in the school and university included productive deviations from our original intentions. These have led to both practical and theoretical shifts in our change effort.
Highlights
In this self-study of teacher education practice, the theoretical framework of expansive learning is used to examine a design experiment (Brown, 1992; Cobb et al, 2003a) aimed at addressing the problem of redefining and reshaping teacher education so as to answer the question of what it would take to bring the university and school together as partners in the pre- and in-service education of teachers for high-poverty urban schools
We have presented a first iteration of the TCOOL project as an example of expansive learning
Though TCOOL is not per se an instructional intervention like those programs studied by Sannino et al (2016) in their study of Change cases, by Cobb et al (2003a) in their overview of design experiments, or by Cobb et al (2009) with regard to design experiments in mathematics, we found that the lenses provided by both theories have given us a glimpse of the meaning of the “qualitative transformation of all components” that Engeström and Sannino (2010) describe
Summary
In this self-study of teacher education practice, the theoretical framework of expansive learning is used to examine a design experiment (Brown, 1992; Cobb et al, 2003a) aimed at addressing the problem of redefining and reshaping teacher education so as to answer the question of what it would take to bring the university and school together as partners in the pre- and in-service education of teachers for high-poverty urban schools. Implicit here is the idea that as the schools that are embraced in the TCOOL project are better aligned with one another and with their higher ed partner around professional learning, the community embraces “its” schools and university as “of the neighborhood” and will view them as assets to the community Such networks of truly committed and engaged educators, students, and parents can foster a powerful conversation beyond the immediate area about what is being learned locally to support students’ academic growth and, at the same time, contribute to the larger conversation about how to advance public education in high poverty communities nationally (DuFour et al, 2005). As described by the Design Research Collaborative in the 2003 special issue of Educational Researcher, “Such collaboration means that goals and design constraints are drawn from the local context as well as the researcher’s agenda” (6) and often results in shifts in the design that can help to “refine the key components of an intervention” (6)
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