Abstract
This article considers the potential of the methodology of social cartography to open generative possibilities in research on diversities and inequalities in teacher education in the international context. Research in teacher education focusing on difference or diversities and inequalities offers highly diverse practices and orientations, yet we have found that intelligibility across research communities can be challenging and ultimately limiting for the field. Social cartography is a methodology that attempts to address this issue, inviting researchers and practitioners to create forms of conversation that are more tentative, self-critical, and generative. In this article, we introduce our priorities in teacher education that center awareness of social-cultural commitments and assumptions, as well as historical context. We then share a social cartography of teacher education research we have created to reveal the possibilities of social cartography for teacher education, as well as an invitation to open needed dialogue amongst teacher education researchers and practitioners.
Highlights
This article focuses on different perspectives and approaches to research and practice in teacher education, and the potential use of social cartography to engage more generatively within the field
We have found that social cartography offers provisional and transitional frames of thinking in the form of visual narratives that emphasize the importance of depth, the ethical imperative to engage with dissent, and the creative potential of dissensus that respects the integrity of different ways of seeing, knowing and being in the world
As a result of engaging with this work, we feel that our potential contribution is in providing a social cartography of teacher education research that maps the specific cluster in teacher education research related to difference or diversities and inequalities from an ideological orientation
Summary
This article focuses on different perspectives and approaches to research and practice in teacher education, and the potential use of social cartography to engage more generatively within the field. We introduce our priorities for research in teacher education that reflects awareness of social-cultural commitments and assumptions, as well as historical context, to enable generative dialogue across research communities From these priorities, we discuss our interpretation of the methodology of social cartography based on the work of Rolland Paulston (2000; 2009) that provides tools to enable shared vocabularies that can open up the potential for deeper dialogue across different paradigms of thought and practice. We have found that social cartography offers provisional and transitional frames of thinking in the form of visual narratives that emphasize the importance of depth, the ethical imperative to engage with dissent, and the creative potential of dissensus that respects the integrity of different ways of seeing, knowing and being in the world It highlights intersections and tensions between intellectual communities inviting readers to sit with difficult cross-roads, to trace origins and implications of perspectives and to open up possibilities for different narratives in relation to the cartography itself and their own practices.
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