Overlapping and entangled crises that comprise and propel society require near constant (re)orientation in order to understand, explain, and address the workings of a multiplicitous world. For those invested in education, this means confronting complexity through the prism of teaching and learning. Educational scholars across fields and disciplines have sought to name, describe, and make sense of this complexity. Many do so in ways that recognize the difference between recent events and cycles of change that have come before.
In other words, they engage in inquiry with a recognition that a convergence of factors produces this moment as different, and thus requires difference in approach to understanding. Building on recent scholarship in posthumanism and social studies education, this dissertation draws upon foundational texts in posthumanism, poststructuralism, and new materialism to re-orient understanding of how social studies teachers learn in the posthuman convergence. In particular, this inquiry explores what happens when social studies teachers are confronted by potentially destabilizing content during professional learning experiences located in a university setting. Considering how learning unfolds in and through complexity, this study examines how the intersecting, overlapping, and nested contexts of the inquiry, within the broader context of the posthuman convergence, intervene in professional learning experiences and shape the ways in which collective and individual learning (un)/(re)fold.
Employing transqualitative methods, this dissertation explores the material-discursive entanglements that constitute social studies teacher professional learning. Transqualitative research is a hybrid of traditional qualitative research design and critical qualitative methods that seeks to disrupt the traditional qualitative focus on the human experience and embrace a posthuman perspective in research design and methodology. Data includes ethnographic participant observation field notes, photographs, artifacts, individual and group interviews, spatial maps, and analytic memos.
Resisting settled findings, this project (re)orients understanding through disclosing provocations meant to support thinking differently about how social studies teachers learn in highly complex contexts. As such, this dissertation strives to help map the complicated terrain that teachers are currently navigating, while informing those invested in supporting teacher learning in the current challenging environment.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:columbia.edu/oai:academiccommons.columbia.edu:10.7916/kwx6-n711 |
| Date | January 2024 |
| Creators | Compton, Allyson |
| Source Sets | Columbia University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Theses |
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