Visual cartographies as strategy to explore teachers’ Learning Trajectories

Author(s):

Juana M. Sancho-Gil(presenting / submitting)Maria Domingo-Coscollola(presenting)Joan-Anton Sánchez-Valero Alejandra Bosco-Paniagua

Conference:

ECER 2017

Network:

01. Continuing Professional Development: Learning for Individuals, Leaders, and Organisations

Format:

Paper

Session Information

01 SES 07 B, Leadership, Dialogic Learning and Career Trajectories

Paper Session

Time:

2017-08-23

17:15-18:45

Room:

K3.16

Chair:

Ruth Kershner

Contribution

This paper is part of the ongoing RTD project How Secondary School Teachers Learn: Educational Implications and Challenges for Addressing Social Change- APREN-DO ( EDU2015-70912-C2-1-R)which main goal to contribute to finding out what, how and where secondary school teachers learn and the consequences that this learning has in improving pedagogical relations, students’ learning processes and results and the global improvement of education. Exploring how teachers learn in a complex and digital world seems fundamental to confront the challenges that teacher’s professional development programs and schools are facing regarding social change and innovation.

Taking into account that “learning is a phenomenon that involves real people who live in real, complex social contexts from which they cannot be abstracted in any meaningful way” (Phillips, 2014, p. 11), in the last years, we have developed several research projects placing special emphasis in the contextual dimensions of learning (Domingo-Coscollola, Sánchez-Valero & Sancho-Gil, 2014; Sancho-Gil & Hernández-Hernández, 2014; Hernández-Hernández & Sancho-Gil, 2016). These projects made evident that personal and professional knowledge cannot be separated from the biographic, cultural, social, technological, and emotional and affective experiences of the learners, as learning is embodied in an ecological process. This environmental notion and our experience and tradition in using visual and artistic methods in educational research (Fendler, Onsès & Hernández-Hernández, 2013; Fendler & Hernández-Hernández, 2015) made us to decide the use of visual narratives (cartographies) as a methodological strategy to explore teachers‘ learning experiences (Martin & Kamberelis, 2013).

Time to time in social and educational sciences a new turn arrives at the research agenda that can become occasional or introduce more permanent new perspectives to the problems under study. One of this seems the case of the spatial turn, that coming from Geography involves a reworking of the very notion and significance of spatiality (Warf & Arias, 2008). In this context, we understand visual cartographies both, as an epistemological tool and as a research method, with a long history in social sciences and education research (Paulston & Liebman, 1994; Hamilton, 2004; Ruitenberg, 2007; Loughran, 2014; Ulmer & Koro-Ljungberg, 2015). We took, in particular, Guattari’ s notion of ‘schizoanalytic cartographies’ (Guattari, 1989) considered as maps which refuse a fixed and invariant domain of subjectivity, but are rather relational configurations, which change state and status as a function of particular assemblages. This notion is useful for our research purpose because can be taken as a strategy to generate 'knowledge' and relate to the theory, from combining different elements, keeping a driver and articulator of a narrative.

For us, cartographies are not a result but a space of thinking and making connections between teachers’ nomadic learning experiences and their visual representations. The notion of nomadic learning (Fendler, 2015) is used to give the account of those interactions that subvert learning process, unveiling what constitutes their limits.

The specific objectives of this project, related to the focus of this paper are:

Mapping up the scenarios in which teachers learn to unveil its value as a source of knowledge and experience.
Detecting learning teachers’ experiences in these scenarios and what perspectives on learning emerge.
Exploring how teachers’ learning styles move between and across the identified settings/ contexts and their professional practice and decisions.

In this paper, we give an account of the implementation of the methodological approach. We go from the contact with teachers to the negotiations of the terms and conditions for participate in the research, to the development of the cartographies in collaborative workshops, to the recording of their reflections about the process and the results of their participation in this workshop and the developed cartography.

Method

As stated in the previous section, we are using an Arts-based research methodology (Cahnmann-Taylor & Siegesmund, 2008) in order to collect and explore the needed information to meet the project’s objectives. We proposed to an intentional sample of secondary school teachers (Patton, 2002) to participate in a collaborative workshop with other teachers to reflect on their processes, ways, opportunities, technologies…, of learning inside and outside the school; and the possible Intersections or divisions between them. We did that on individual bases, but suggested they also could invite other colleagues to participate, and this opened up an unexpected opportunity. Three groups of teachers of three secondary schools around Barcelona, accepted to participate in a collaborative workshop to develop their learning cartographies. In each workshop participated different members of the research group: 1. Secondary school one: 11 teachers. The whole faculty, plus the caretaker that plays an important educational role. 9 researchers. 2. Secondary school two: 8 teachers. 7 researchers. 3. Secondary school three: 7 teachers plus the headmaster. 5 researchers. Teachers were sent information about the project and the voluntary participation form to be signed in advance. They were also asked to give us same basic data about themselves and to bring with them any image, picture, artifact..., they thought to be fundamental in their learning process and wanted to be included in the cartography and to think about why they have decided to participate in this research. The development of the workshops proceeded as follows: 1. Presentation of the members of the research group. 2. Presentation of the participants, who were asked: why I decided to participate in this research. 3. Brief explanation questions and doubts about “what we mean by cartography”. 4. Development of the cartographies. Teachers were provided with different resources. Researchers observed, asked, answered questions or helped, if required by participants. 5. Once the cartography was finish, each participant stood in front of it and a video camera and explained their process and the meaning of the work done. 6. At the end, the remaining participants commented on the general feeling of having participated in this activity. At the end of this process, we had: 26 cartographies, 26 video-recording and a good volume of field notes and photographs. The second round of this methodological process will be the second meeting with each group of the teacher to share with them our analysis of the cartographies.

Expected Outcomes

Our research culture and tradition of researching with, instead of researching on, is providing (Domingo-Coscollola, Sánchez-Valero & Sancho-Gil, 2014) highly reach and unexpected insights in our research with secondary school teachers. So far, the most remarkable findings of this research in the process are: 1. The unexpected eagerness of the always busy and overwhelmed secondary school teacher to offer us their time, effort and reflexions. 2. As found in the collaborative workshops, developed in their respective schools, teachers decided to participate because of the way in which the proposal was presented to them. In all cases was done through a colleague they trusted. The oral and written information provided was clear and appealing. They felt to be treated as people with agency, and not as objects or sources of data. They thought the participation in the proposal could help them to better understand not only how they learn, by how their students learn. 3. The development of the workshop was an evidence of what an educational research is. John Elliott made a distinction between “research on education”, and “educational research”. The second notion meaning that the process has to be “educational” for all involved in it and in every moment of it. 4. Teachers are expecting our feedback with the analysis of their cartographies and feel eager to establish further collaboration with our group. The following steps, consisting of the analysis and interpretation of the huge amount of information gathered, will be crucial to gain insights in the ways and modes secondary teachers work and provide suggestions for improving professional development programs.

References

Cahnmann-Taylor, M., & Siegesmund, R. (2008). Arts-based research in education: foundations for practice. New York: Routledge. Domingo-Coscollola, M., Sánchez-Valero, J. A., & Sancho-Gil, J. M. (2014). Researching with Young People: Collaborating and Educating. Comunicar, 42, 157-164. doi: 10.3916/C42-2014-15 Fendler, R., & Hernández-Hernández, F. (2014). Using arts-based research strategies to document learning in a course on arts-based research. In R. Marín-Viadel, J. Roldán & X. Molinet-Medina (Eds.), Foundations, criteria, contexts in arts based research and artistic research (pp. 157-168). Granada: University of Granada. Fendler, R. (2015). Navigating the eventful space of learning: Mobilities, nomadism and other tactical maneuvers. University of Barcelona. Unpublished PhD. Fendler, R., Onsès, J., & Hernández-Hernández, F. (2013). Becoming arts-based researchers: A journey through the experience of silence in the university classroom. International Journal of Educations through Art, 9(2), 257-263. Guattari, F. (2012). Schizoanalytic Cartographies. Bloomsbury: London. Hamilton, M. L. (2004). Professional knowledge, teacher education and self-study. In J. J. Loughran, M. L. Hamilton, V. K. LaBoskey, & T. Russell (Eds.), International handbook of self-study of teaching and teacher education practices (pp. 375-419). Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic. Hernández-Hernández, F., & Sancho-Gil, J. M. (2016). Using meta-ethnographic analysis to understand and represent youth’s notions and experiences of learning in and out secondary school. Ethnography and Education, Published online: 29 May 2016. doi: 10.1080/17457823.2016.1180542 Loughran, J. (2014). Professionally developing as a teacher educator. Journal of Teacher Education, 65(4), 271–283. doi:10.1177/0022487114533386 Martin, A. D., & Kamberelis, G. (2013). Mapping not tracing: Qualitative educational research with political teeth. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 26, 668-679. doi: 10.1080/09518398.2013.788756 Patton, M. (2002). Qualitative Research & Evaluation Methods. Sage: Thousand Oaks. California. Paulston, R.G., & Liebman, M. (1994). An Invitation to Postmodern Social Cartography, Comparative Education Review, 38(2), 215-232. Phillips, D. C. (2014). Research in the Hard Sciences, and in Very Hard “Softer” Domains. Educational Researcher, 43(1), 9-11. doi: 10.3102/0013189X13520293 Ruitenberg, C. (2007). Here be dragons: Exploring Cartography in Educational Theory and Research. Complicity: An International Journal of Complexity and Education, 4, 7-24. Sancho, J. M. y Hernández-Hernández, F. (coord.) (2014) Maestros al vaivén. Aprender la profesión docente en el mundo actual. Barcelona: Octaedro. Ulmer, J. B. & Koro-Ljungberg, M. (2015). Writing Visually Through (Methodological) Events and Cartography. Qualitative Inquiry, 21(2), 138-152. Warf, B., & Arias, S. (Eds.) (2008). The Spatial Turn: Interdisciplinarity Perspectives. London and New York: Routledge.

Author Information

Juana M. Sancho-Gil (presenting / submitting)

University of Barcelona, Spain

Maria Domingo-Coscollola (presenting)

Universitat Internacional de Catalunya, Spain

Joan-Anton Sánchez-Valero

University of Barcelona, Spain

Alejandra Bosco-Paniagua

Universititat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain

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