The Contested Space of STEM-Art Integration: Cultural Humility and Collaborative Interdisciplinarity
Dissertation
Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University
By
Kerry Dixon
Graduate Program in Education: Teaching and Learning
The Ohio State University
2016
Dissertation Committee:
Dr. Valerie Kinloch, Advisor
Dr. Patricia A. Brosnan
Dr. Candace Jesse Stout
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Copyrighted by
Kerry Dixon
2016
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Abstract
This dissertation study is part of Project ASPIRE (Apprenticeships Supported by
Partnerships for Innovation and Reform in Education) (U.S. Department of Education
Award Number U336S090049), which created a new model for urban teacher education based on principles of equity, diversity, and social justice. That model was focused on preparing highly qualified teachers in hard-to-staff content areas to teach in high-need public middle and high schools. This dissertation focuses on one component of the overarching ASPIRE project: a teacher inquiry group comprised of veteran secondary science, mathematics and world language teachers charged with determining how arts- integrated teaching and learning could inform the preparation of pre-service urban teachers in their content areas. Specifically, the study explores how four of the inquiry group members—one mathematics teacher and three science teachers—engaged with and enacted arts integration in their own classrooms.
While many arts supporters have advocated for the inclusion of the arts within
STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) education policy, funding and practice, there is currently little research-based consensus on what exactly constitutes high quality STEM-Art integration. Furthermore, there is scant research-based guidance on how such integration can be systematically enacted to meet the needs of all students.
Drawing on theories of interdisciplinarity (Boix Mansilla, 2006; Becher, 1989; Klein,
1990), Communities of Practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991) and teacher inquiry (Cochran-
ii Smith & Lytle, 2009), this dissertation study examines how the four study participants negotiated the interdisciplinary co-construction of knowledge about visual art with the inquiry group and within their own classrooms. In addition, it explores how they conceptualized the purpose of visual art integration within the teaching and learning of science and mathematics.
Findings indicate that the four study participants explored STEM-Art integration with a notable lack of paradigmatic defensiveness as it related to the culturally-bound knowledges and practices of their (science and mathematics) disciplines. This disciplinary (cultural) humility allowed them to view visual art as well as their own subject areas with high levels of reflexivity. This, in turn, led them to enact authentic, collaborative, and enduring STEM-Art integration. The concept of cultural humility in the context of STEM-Art integration extends interdisciplinarity as a theory of action and locates it within a critical paradigm. As such, these findings have implications not only for the development of more consistent and rigorous STEM-Art integration methodologies, but also for the enactment of equity-oriented, asset pedagogies, particularly by teachers belonging to dominant groups and whose cultural identities do not match those of their students, as is often the case in urban school settings.
Keywords: STEM; art; interdisciplinary; urban education; teacher preparation; cultural humility; secondary STEM education; equity; multicultural; arts integration; education reform
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Dedication
This dissertation is dedicated to my grandmothers, Helen Marie Hager and Eva Elizabeth Dixon.
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Acknowledgements
There is a Hopi saying that one finger cannot lift a pebble. So too, one person cannot produce a dissertation. While this dissertation was authored by me, it is indelibly marked by the many special people who helped me along the way, and without whose support, it would not have come to be. First and foremost, I wish to acknowledge and thank—from the bottom of my heart—Dr. Valerie Kinloch. Your willingness to take me on as your advisee when I was already far into my doctoral journey and greatly in need of your guidance was a game-changer. Thank you for the profoundly humanizing approach you took to supporting my learning journey, especially for the beautiful balance you struck between respecting my thoughts and pushing me to confront the slipperiness of my own whiteness through critical thinking and reflexivity. Project ASPIRE and the Innovative Curriculum Design Team changed my life; you gave me the tools to articulate my thoughts about how that experience relates to broader, pressing issues of equity, diversity, and social justice. And, you gave me a shining example of how one can live these principles, both in word and in deed. I will be forever in your debt.
To Dr. Patricia Brosnan and Dr. Candace Stout I extend my deepest appreciation for your willingness to serve on my dissertation committee. Patti, your insights on my data and your fundamental decency and compassion have carried me through this process, from the early days of my dissertation writing to my defense. I’d like to especially thank you for sharing your thoughts on my work with my family; it meant so much to them and to me. Candace, thank you for fitting me into your busy schedule and for carrying out such a thoughtful reading of my work. Your fair, incisive and rigorous questioning made me feel as though I was being both prepared for scholarly work and carefully initiated into its cultural practices. I’m honored to have my work critiqued and supported by you.
I would also like to thank Project ASPIRE’s Principal Investigator, Dr. Sandra Stroot. Sandy, what can I say? You and Rebecca Kantor-Martin gave me the opportunity of a lifetime. Thank you for taking a chance on the arts and for believing in the ICDT. Thank you also for fiercely protecting my work and for helping me to better understand it in the larger context of education reform and urban teacher education. I have learned so much from your masterful leadership, and I thank my lucky stars that I got to watch you in action for these past six—nearly seven—years. Being apprenticed into scholarship and educational leadership by you and Valerie has been one of the greatest privileges of my life.
And, speaking of Project ASPIRE . . . sometime about mid-way through its six-year duration, LaShaun “Shaun” Carter insisted that our project team’s efforts be directed at
v ensuring that ASPIRE become part of the very DNA of our program graduates. In striving to fulfill that objective, ASPIRE became part of my DNA too. Therefore, I’d like to say a very special thank you to those whom I will always consider my kin: the Project ASPIRE administrative team. As Lave and Wenger (1991) so eloquently pointed out, learning means “becoming a different person.” (p. 53) For all that you have taught me and helped me to become, thank you again, Sandy, Rebecca, Valerie, and Patti; and thank you anew, Shaun Carter, Tanya McClanahan, Marguerethe Jaede, Peggy Kasten, Mandy McCormick Smith, and Audra Slocum.
Shaun, it has been an honor to observe your tireless, eloquent advocacy for urban youth—especially urban youth of color. Your intellectual prowess, deep compassion, and linguistic skill have lifted my spirits and inspired me forward more times than I can count.
Tanya, thank you for your ongoing collaboration and support. Above all, thank you for leveraging your incisiveness, intellectual humility, and graceful professionalism to further the work of the ICDT. I aspire to these qualities, which you so easily embody.
Marguerethe, you are a fierce warrior for justice and decency, and I am honored to be your colleague and friend. Thank you for sharing your wicked sense of humor, brutal honesty, and razor-sharp mind with me. If ever there were someone I could trust to not leave a comrade behind on the battlefield, it is you.
Peggy, thank you for being part of a special team of women who so selflessly looked out for the next generation of women scholars. Your warmth, wisdom and encouragement through this process of becoming a researcher have given me comfort and strength.
Mandy, thank you for your friendship as we made our way through the dissertation journey together. Having you as a fellow Project ASPIRE Graduate Associate was just a dream, and I am deeply grateful for all the times you selflessly shared your knowledge about science education and Conceptual Change Theory with me. You have provided a shining example of how to persist in the face of adversity with courage, determination, and smiles.
Audra, you were there in the early days of Project ASPIRE, and in many ways, you understood what we were doing in the ICDT much better than I did. I cannot thank you enough for your perceptiveness and for helping to maintain the integrity of the space within which the ICDT seeded its ideas. I will forget neither your kindness nor your appreciation of what the arts can mean for young people.
To the ICDT as a whole, I hope that I have faithfully represented the work we did together, and I thank you profusely for the hours and hours we spent in each other’s company, dedicated to Project ASPIRE and holding fast to belief that we could contribute meaningfully to an education reform premised on equity, diversity, and social justice. In particular, I’d like to thank Madith Barton, Olga Delinikos, Dawn Hasselbach, Christy
vi Hoerig, Erin Hollen, Kathleen Kleemeyer, Alexandra “Sacha” Miller, Margaret Peponis, Mary Ann Shrum, Thomas Trang, Kelly Weinfurtner, and, the four amazing educators who selflessly agreed to be part of my dissertation study: Teresa Bombrys, Pam Snyder, Caren Truske and Rebecca Woods. While each of you is unique—as I hope will be made clear in the pages that follow—you share a number of qualities, which have enriched not only this dissertation study, but also my life more broadly. Above all, you embody what it means to be “other oriented”, and I am beyond lucky to have been an other who benefited from this venerable quality.
Teresa, you are a profile in courage and integrity. Thank you for being willing to share so much with me: your history, your thought processes, your classroom, and more. Your ability to analyze yourself and others in order to follow justice-based pathways through life is extraordinary. I have the deepest respect and admiration for you; you are a moral barometer upon which I rely heavily in my professional and personal life.
Pam, thank you for sharing your patience, pragmatism, generosity, and intelligence with me. I have learned so much from the work we undertook together, and I am always astounded at how you build risk-taking, progress-inducing actions on a solid foundation of careful, considered judgment. You personify great science. And great friendship.
Caren, thank you for the countless hours spent in your company, both in your classroom and beyond. From the moment I met you, it was clear that you had something very special to offer the world. How fortunate I was that your adventurous spirit brought us together and that your extraordinary perceptiveness and open-mindedness were the perfect environment where the seeds of our explorations could be planted and grow. You were the “Yoda” of the ICDT: a sage who always seemed to know how to find True North and gently keep us on track in our quest for transformation. In the process, you transformed me. I will always be grateful.
And, Becky . . . my appreciation of you is also immense. Like Marguerethe Jaede, you are one of the most loyal, trustworthy people I have ever met. You continually provided the glue that held our group together and a powerful strategy that diffused the impact of the work that meant so much to us all. And, thanks to your incredible interdisciplinary mind, compassionate spirit, and skilled pedagogical moves, I can honestly say that the math phobia I have carried with me since the fifth grade is finally dissipating. Thank you for lifting that burden and for being my teacher and my friend.
I would also like to thank my compatriots in the doctoral program at The Ohio State University: Heather Hill and Gilbert Kaburu. As a nontraditional student with very little time for university-based activities beyond coursework and GA duties, your friendship kept me going through the ups and downs of a potentially lonely doctoral journey. I’m honored to have traveled in trust and camaraderie with you. In particular, I’ll never forget our many honest late-night conversations, which taught me much about race, racism, equity, and social justice.
vii My deep gratitude extends to my friends beyond OSU. Thank you, Rachael Moore and Jennifer Pentecost, for sharing your gifts for teaching and art making with me. Rachael, it was a joy to work with you on the ICDT, to learn from your interdisciplinary critical thinking skills, and to watch you grow into the accomplished art teacher that you are today. Jenn, your artist’s eye and hands are awesome to behold, and I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to brainstorm so many arts-integrated curricular possibilities with you. I have learned much indeed from your artistry and your aesthetic discernment.
Thank you, Dr. Seth Chin-Parker, for sharing your knowledge of creativity and cognition with me and for supporting my application to the doctoral program. You gave me a foundation upon which this dissertation is built.
Dr. Karin Dahl, you have provided me with ongoing mentorship through the entire doctoral process; I have been incredibly fortunate to have you to turn to for advice on everything from R-1 politics to literature review writing, surviving the personal toll a Ph.D. program takes, and more. Thank you for being an ongoing source of encouragement and inspiration to me, and for sharing your singular insights on what art making can mean for teaching and learning.
Amy Mock, I have never met a more service-oriented person than you, and I am grateful that you have so generously shared that disposition with me. I treasure your friendship, and I know that I would not have made it through the dissertation process without your compassionate ear, your willingness to be a second mother to my girls, and the many wonderful meals you provided us.
Rachael Goodrich, from the time we were students together at Bates College, you have been my dear friend through thick and thin. You came to Ohio at just the right moment and brought your characteristic honesty, kindness and razor-sharp intelligence to your review of my doctoral program application. Without your rigorous critique, my chances of reaching this point would surely have been diminished.
To my cherished friend, Karen Zeltzer, LCSW, I owe a great emotional and scholarly debt of gratitude. Karen, it was our many conversations about the social justice-oriented nature of our respective work that led ultimately to the articulation of my dissertation findings. Thank you for listening so carefully to me as I discussed the anti-racism work involved in Project ASPIRE and for mentioning the concept of cultural humility as it relates equity-oriented social work. You planted a seed of understanding, which grew and flourished as my data analysis progressed. The impact of your work and your friendship on my life is enormous.
I am also indebted to my family for their unconditional support in my undertaking. To my mother, Mary Dixon, thank you for raising me with your unwavering commitment to social justice and to education as the practice of democracy. Your road has not been easy, yet you have maintained your fidelity to the principles of kindness, compassion, peace, and love. I’m lucky to be on the receiving end of this. To my father, Ron Dixon, thank
viii you for being my lifelong hero. When the doctoral journey was at its toughest, it was the desire to make you proud that kept me going. If all men were as gentle, strong, intelligent, reflective, and funny as you, the world would be an infinitely better place. To my step-mother, Olga Avila, thank you for your ebullient support, for your warm embraces, and for regaling me with your childhood story of attending your father’s dissertation defense. This drove me onward so that I could provide the same memory for my own daughters. To my brother, Jamie Dixon, I have never adequately thanked you for delaying your own college dreams and providing financial support so that I could pursue mine first. You are our father’s son; my gratitude to you is beyond measure. To my sister, Kelly Dixon, thank you for being a perfect older sister: you continually leave me astounded at the depth and breadth of your knowledge, which is surpassed only by your kindness and your resilience.
My daughters, Ruby and Lulu Yearling, have been both the means and ends in this doctoral journey. Thank you both for putting up with the hours, days, months and years that I have spent working on this dissertation and earning my Ph.D. Without your resilience, self-sufficiency, flexibility, and generosity, I never would have been able to undertake—let alone complete—this work. It is my deepest hope that when you look back on it, your sacrifices will have been worthwhile and that this experience will have supported you in becoming strong women with unshakable confidence and a clear sense of purpose. I hope also that because you have witnessed my process, you will be able to find a shorter, more direct route to achieving your own professional aims. Whatever path you follow, I will always be both fiercely proud of and immensely thankful to you. I love you beyond measure.
Finally, I would like to thank Dr. Abram Kaplan, without whom I most definitely would not be writing these acknowledgements today. Abram, thank you for everything: teaching me what social science is, patiently explaining the positivistic paradigm and quantitative research methods, showing this middle-aged graduate student how to find articles in a digital database, sharing your perspectives as an artist, listening to my jumbled thoughts and mapping them into a coherent form . . . . the list goes on and on. Until I was lucky enough to have Valerie Kinloch as my advisor, you selflessly filled that role for me. Most of all, you have understood how important it was for me to reach this goal. Your belief that I could do it kept me going when I was convinced I could not. I am forever grateful to you for keeping my head above the water and for showing me how beautiful it is when you reach the shore. Thank you.
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Vita
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) ...... Columbus, OH The Ohio State University, Dept. of Teaching and Learning ...... Expected: August, 2016
Master of Arts (M.A.) ...... Chicago, IL The University of Chicago ...... June, 1993
Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) ...... Lewiston, ME Bates College ...... May, 1991
Graduate Research Associate/Graduate Teaching Associate The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH ...... 2010-16
Executive Director Beta by Design Granville, OH ...... 2013-present
Co-Executive Director Granville Studio of Visual Arts, Granville, OH ...... 2007-2013
Instructional Coach & Curriculum Designer EDWorks, Cincinnati, OH ...... 2009, 2013-14
Instructor, Art History & Visual Culture Academy of Art College, San Francisco, CA ...... 1995-99
Curatorial Associate, Painting & Sculpture San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA ...... 1997-99
Curatorial Assistant, Architecture/Design, Photography, Digital Media, Painting/Sculpture San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA ...... 1995-97
Regional Director, Southern United States Academic Year in America, Greenwich, CT ...... 1994-95
Instructor, Mathematics, French, Senior Capstone, Art History Ecole d’Humanite, Hasliberg-Goldern, Switzerland ...... 1993-94
Publications
Dixon, K., Rhoades, M., Barton, M. & Stroot, S. (2014). Collaborative interdisciplinarity: A partnership-based model for developing innovations in urban teacher education. Proceedings from AERA National Convention. Philadelphia, PA, (http://www.aera.net/Default.aspx?TabID=10250).
Fields of Study
Major Field: Education: Teaching and Learning x
Table of Contents
Abstract ...... ii
Dedication ...... iv
Acknowledgements ...... v
Vita ...... x
List of Tables ...... xvii
List of Figures ...... xviii
Chapter 1: All Hands on Deck ...... 1
Introduction ...... 1
Situating STEM in the Obama Era ...... 8
STEM Backlash and the Rise of the STEAM Movement ...... 13
The Need for STEM-Art Research ...... 15
Arts Integration from a STEM Perspective ...... 16
STEM+Art in Urban Contexts: Building the Deck for a New STEM Workforce ...... 17
STEM and Multicultural Education ...... 20
The ASPIRE Project ...... 23
Purpose of the Study ...... 25
Organization of the Dissertation ...... 25
Chapter 2: Sociocultural Lenses for Interdisciplinary Teaching and Learning ...... 28
Introduction to the Theoretical Framework ...... 31
xi Situating the Research: Sociocultural Theory ...... 33
Zone of Proximal Development ...... 35
Scaffolding by a More Skilled Other ...... 37
Communities of Practice ...... 38
Modes of Inquiry for Teacher Learning ...... 43
Projects of Inquiry ...... 44
Classroom-Based Inquiry ...... 44
Cooperative Practitioner Inquiry ...... 45
Inquiry Groups versus Conventional Professional Development ...... 48
Theories of Interdisciplinarity ...... 49
An Etymological Perspective: The Nature of Disciplines ...... 49
Conceptualizing STEM as a Discipline ...... 52
The Construction of Interdisciplinarity ...... 55
Arts Integration ...... 57
STEM-Art Integration ...... 60
Arts Integration as a Multicultural Endeavor ...... 62
Theoretical Intersections ...... 65
Collaboration ...... 66
Design-Inquiry ...... 68
Curriculum Design-Inquiry ...... 71
Participating in Interdisciplinarity: Apprenticeship Theory ...... 72
Conclusion ...... 76
Chapter 3: A Post-Interpretivist Approach ...... 78
xii Introduction ...... 78
Ethnographic Methods ...... 80
Classical Ethnography ...... 80
Critical Ethnography ...... 81
Interpretive Ethnography ...... 81
Blurring the Boundaries ...... 83
Situating Myself in Multiple Roles ...... 84
Criticality and Personal Dimensions of the Research ...... 84
Radical Reflexivity ...... 86
Looking for Magic: The Pursuit of Authentic Interdisciplinarity ...... 91
Situating the Study ...... 92
The School District ...... 92
Student Demographics ...... 94
Teacher Demographics ...... 95
The Innovative Curriculum Design Team (ICDT) ...... 95
ICDT Activities ...... 97
Case Selection ...... 110
The Four Cases ...... 111
Caren ...... 112
Pam ...... 113
Becky ...... 115
Teresa ...... 116
Data Collection ...... 117
xiii Data Analysis ...... 120
Transcription ...... 120
Theme Discovery: Initial Coding ...... 122
Organization of Themes ...... 123
Testing and Theorizing ...... 124
Limitations ...... 125
Chapter 4: Collaborative Learning at the Frontier of New Knowledge ...... 127
From Roles to Typologies: Interdisciplinary Concept Formation ...... 128
The Politics of Naming ...... 131
Slippery White Metaphors ...... 132
Interdisciplinarity and a History of Frontier Metaphors ...... 134
Theme 1: Scouting (Featuring Caren) ...... 137
Wayfinding ...... 140
Into the Unknown ...... 141
The Quest for Art and Magic ...... 146
Qualities of a Scout ...... 149
Exploration and Openness to Experience ...... 149
Multi-Perspectival Vision ...... 152
Comfort with Ambiguity ...... 156
Spatializing Time and Space ...... 157
Kinesthetic Competence ...... 158
Stillness while Moving: A Scout’s Dialectical Materialism ...... 160
Theme 2: The Cartographer (Featuring Pam) ...... 161
xiv Role of the Cartographer ...... 163
Cartographic Ways of Being ...... 163
Cartographer as Scientist ...... 164
Systematic Observation ...... 165
Connecting the Dots ...... 168
Measuring for Precision and Accuracy ...... 171
Cartographer as Artist ...... 174
Art as Instrumental ...... 175
Art as Human Expression ...... 179
Theme 3: The Translator (Featuring Becky) ...... 185
Translating for Interdisciplinary Dialogism ...... 188
Translator as Dictionary: The Role of the Literal ...... 190
Translator as Interpreter ...... 193
Identification of Boundary Objects ...... 193
Boundary Objects as Artifacts: The Work of Art ...... 195
Boundary Objects as Process: The Importance of Connecting ...... 199
Boundary Objects as Discourse: Metaphors in the Trading Zone ...... 205
Facilitating a New Discourse ...... 211
Theme 4: Homesteading (Featuring Teresa) ...... 211
Homesteading by (White) Women ...... 212
Entering the Territory ...... 214
Homesteading as Synthesis ...... 216
Homesteading and Resilience ...... 220
xv Resource Procurement and Mobilization ...... 221
Courage to Be ...... 226
Protecting the Community ...... 232
Conclusion ...... 243
Chapter 5: Cultural Humility in the Interdisciplinary Contact Zone ...... 245
Summary of Findings ...... 248
Communication and Collaboration Across Worldviews ...... 250
Humility in the ICDT ...... 251
Democratic Engagements Beyond the ICDT ...... 257
Cultural Humility: Toward a New Theory of Interdisciplinary Teaching and Learning ...... 258
From Miracle to Method ...... 259
The Miracle Model: Assumptions and Implications ...... 262
The Method Model: A Systems Approach ...... 262
Environments Characterized by Cultural Humility ...... 264
Selection ...... 264
Strategies ...... 266
Broader Implications for Teacher Education ...... 269
Limitations and Cautions ...... 271
References ...... 278
xvi
List of Tables
Table 1. 2014 School District Report Card ...... 93
Table 2. 2013-14 Columbus City Schools Student Demographics ...... 95
Table 3. Total ICDT Teacher Participation Across 5 Years ...... 97
Table 4. Year 1 Classroom-Based Activities ...... 98 Table 5. Year 2 Classroom-Based Activities ...... 101
Table 6. Year 3 Classroom-Based Activities ...... 104
Table 7. Year 4 Classroom-Based Activities ...... 107
Table 8. Year 5 Classroom-Based Activities ...... 109
Table 9. Year 4 ICDT Focus Group Participation ...... 119
xvii
List of Figures
Figure 1. Theoretical Model ...... 32
Figure 2. 2010 NSF Funding Relative to Funding for U.S. Arts Organizations ...... 63
Figure 3. Theoretical Model Showing Areas of Intersection ...... 65
Figure 4. Year 1 ICDT Structure ...... 99
Figure 5. Year 2 ICDT Structure ...... 100
Figure 6. Science (Career Tech) Teacher Learning Plein Air, Representational Painting at an Artist’s Studio ...... 102
Figure 7. Science, Mathematics, and French Teachers in an Immersive Art Experience in which They Collaboratively Designed and Created an Abstract, Conceptual Artwork Expressing their Experience in the ICDT . 102
Figure 8. Science, Mathematics, and French Teachers in an Immersive Art Experience in which They Collaboratively Designed and Created an Abstract, Conceptual Artwork Expressing their Experience in the ICDT .. 103
Figure 9. Year 3 ICDT Structure ...... 105
Figure 10.Year 4 ICDT Structure ...... 108 Figure 11. Year 5 ICDT Activities ...... 110 Figure 12. Exhibition of Student Artworks in the Art Facility’s Gallery ...... 145
Figure 13. ICDT Members Engage in Iterative Curriculum Design Process ...... 148
Figure 14: Caren Learning How to see Like an Artist ...... 153
Figure 15: Collaborative Student Artwork Created in Caren’s Class ...... 156
Figure 16. ICDT Members Making Wire Sculptures at the Art Facility ...... 166
Figure 17. Painting by the Artist Similar to Demonstration Artwork Described by Pam (Paul Hamilton, Composition 32) ...... 167 xviii
Figure 18. Exhibition of Pam’s Students’ Artworks from the “Seeing Cells in Three Dimensions” Unit ...... 169
Figure 19. Pam Creating her Painting During Field Trip to the Art Studio ...... 180
Figure 20. Image Created by Pam Using 35 mm Digital SLR Camera During Studio Trip ...... 181
Figure 21. Pam Creating a Symbolic Representation of her Family Growth, and Change ...... 182
Figure 22. Pam’s Student Creating Artwork During Unit on Protein Synthesis ...... 184
Figure 23. Artwork Used in the ICDT Visual Inquiry (Sikander, 2001, Pleasure Pillars) ...... 195
Figure 24. Inspired by ASPIRE (Project ASPIRE ICDT, 2012) ...... 199
Figure 25. Becky’s Algebra 1 Students Learning Slope by Narrating Their Life Stories through Painted Compositions of Abstract Form ...... 201
Figure 26. Artwork by Teresa’s 6th-Grade Student, Representing the Process of Evaporation and Three States of Matter ...... 242
Figure 27. Collaborative Artwork by Teresa’s 6th-Grade Students, Representing Plant and Animal Cells and their Organelles ...... 242
Figure 28. Proposed Conceptual framework ...... 246
Figure 29. Visualization of a Missing Piece Within Interdisciplinary Theories ...... 259
Figure 30. Conceptual Framework for the Enactment of Interdisciplinary Teaching and Learning ...... 260
xix
Chapter 1:
All Hands on Deck
Introduction
This dissertation study was conducted during a time of remarkable social change in the United States of America. It began in the autumn of 2009, just a few short months after the election of the nation’s 44th president, Barack Obama. Obama, an accomplished
Harvard University educated attorney who served as a democratic senator in the Illinois
Senate, became the country’s first African American president. He guided the nation through unprecedented social and political reforms such as universal healthcare, marriage equality, the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, and the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr.,
Hate Crimes Prevention Act.
Now, in the spring of 2016 and in the twilight of the Obama Era, this study has reached its conclusion. At this time, election year politics have brought to the fore a frighteningly strong element of permanently disaffected citizens who embrace the racist, xenophobic, homophobic, and misogynistic platform of the ultra-conservative right, affording an anti-intellectual, narcissistic, white demagogue the real possibility of being elected to the nation’s highest office. If ever there was a moment that historians could point to as an example of backlash against social progress, it could certainly be now. As
Kagan (2016) argued recently in the Washington Post, this demagogue (Donald Trump) has leveraged bigotry, embodying “Obama hatred” which Kagan defined as “a racially tinged derangement syndrome that made any charge plausible and any opposition 1 justified” (www.washingtonpost.com). At the same time and toward the left of the political spectrum, a white, Christian woman (Hillary Clinton) and a white, Jewish, self- proclaimed democratic socialist calling for free post-secondary education for all (Bernie
Sanders), both have a viable chance of becoming the 45th President of the United States.
In many ways, the election-year politics of 2016 echo the ideological struggles that played out in the realm of education during the years in which this dissertation study was conducted. With the onset of President Obama’s first term in office, many progressives believed that education reform would experience a recalibration and steer away from the capitalistic goals of economic competitiveness, privatization, and top-down accountability that had come to determine American education policy since the Regan administration
(Lipman, 2015). They hoped the ship would be righted toward equity, particularly in urban schools where the legacy of systemic racism and other forms of inequity so often lead to a chronic lack of resources and underperformance. However, by appointing Arne
Duncan, former CEO of Chicago Public Schools, as U.S. Secretary of Education, the
President signaled his preference for a corporatized approach to education and education reform. According to Lipman (2015):
Building on “reforms” launched in Chicago, market logics, privatization, and economic competitiveness drive the administration’s education policy from preschool through higher education. Obama’s signature Race to the Top (RTTT) economic stimulus funding for education, and his Blueprint for Reform proposal for reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), incentivize market oriented policies, especially in districts with large numbers of schools labeled as “failing.” (p. 58)
Those market-oriented policies include the expansion of privatized charter and turnaround schools, linking student test scores to teacher evaluation (and, therefore, compensation),
2 takeovers of troubled schools by states and private organizations, and the creation of data systems that allow schools and districts to be controlled remotely by external organizations (Karp, 2010; Lipman, 2015).
Within this context and through funding by the U.S. Department of Education during the Obama years, I have undertaken this dissertation study, using ethnographic methods to explore how four secondary teachers of mathematics and science in a high- need urban school district took up visual art integration in their professional practices. It is particularly remarkable that they did so given the ever-mounting accountability movement pressures that have made pedagogical nonconformity for science and mathematics teachers highly risky and, therefore, unlikely. As part of a teacher education reform initiative, this dissertation study explores the applicability of the study participants’ experiences to the social-justice-based preparation of future mathematics and science teachers committed to pursuing careers in urban education. The overarching initiative,
Project ASPIRE (Apprenticeships Supported by Partnerships for Innovation and Reform in Education), was one of 28 Teacher Quality Partnership (TQP) awards granted to institutions of higher education during Obama’s first year in office by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Innovation and Improvement. Like all TQP initiatives, Project
ASPIRE (and, therefore, this dissertation study) focused on improving the quality of new teachers in high-need schools within a high-need district. As was required by the TQP program and Title II of the Higher Education Act, “high-need” status was determined on the basis of the number of children in the school district and in targeted schools who live in poverty.
3 The complex, mutually inflecting relationship between socio-economic disadvantage, child development, institutionalized inequity, discrimination, and academic underperformance has been repeatedly documented (Bradley & Corwyn, 2002; Zirkel,
2005; Noguera, 2008). It is also part of the rhetoric shaping school reform as it pertains to the STEM (Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics) education movement.
Since the Soviet Union launched the world’s first artificial satellite into orbit in 1957, U.S. national and foreign policy has prioritized regaining and maintaining the country’s position as a global leader in the realms of technology and scientific innovation. In recent years, the dot.com revolution has reinvigorated this Sputnik Era commitment, in part through a national education policy focused on STEM education. From a capitalistic perspective, improved STEM education is vital to the United States economy. In fact, thousands of STEM-related jobs go currently unfilled every year due to lack of qualified applicants. Moreover, given the direction of the global economy, it is undeniable that without STEM literacy, one’s competitive edge in the employment market is diminished, which, in turn, compromises one’s access to material resources. Therefore, addressing the lack of highly qualified STEM teachers and the so-called STEM achievement gap between the socio-economically disadvantaged and the socio-economically dominant is an important part of education reform and poverty mitigation efforts. However, this reality raises questions about the purposes of education and whose perspectives are represented in potential answers.
While descriptions of STEM literacy vary, most definitions associated directly with U.S. education policy include workforce preparation as a core component (National
Governors Association, 2007; National Research Council, 2011; National Academy of
4 Engineering & National Research Council, 2014). With their emphasis on technical and cognitive skills, such definitions also assume an autonomous (Street, 1984) view of literacy, which largely fails to account for the varied ways STEM is realized in non- dominant epistemological communities and positions positivistic sense-making and its associated workforce competitiveness as the presumptive standards against which all are implicitly measured.
In the context of language, Street (2003) argued that the autonomous model of literacy,
operates on the premises that “introducing literacy to poor, ‘illiterate’ people, villages urban youth, etc. will have the effect of enhancing their cognitive skills, improving their economic prospects, making them better citizens, regardless of the social and economic conditions that accounted for their ‘illiteracy’ in the first place. (p. 77)
He further explained that literacy should be understood as a practice that “varies from one context to another and from one culture to another and so, therefore, do the effects of the different literacies in different conditions” (Street, 2003, p. 77). Numerous education scholars in the STEM fields have adopted a similar perspective that contests traditional definitions of their disciplines—and, by implication, mainstream definitions of STEM literacy. For example, Southerland (2000) argued that mainstream science often lacks self- awareness and reflexivity about the Western, European roots of its methodological and epistemic assumptions (i.e., that quality science is “characterized by reliability on evidence and reason with the goal of understanding an objective, external, physical world”
[p. 290]). As such, some scholars in the field often avoid critical interrogation of what counts as science and what does not. Southerland (2000) advocated for more substantive,
5 expansive understandings of the field, urging educators to achieve Curricular
Multicultural Science Education (Southerland, 2000). This construct requires that teachers
“redefine the epistemology of science to equate local or ethnic ways of understanding the physical world with that of western science.” (Southerland, Golden & Enderle, 2012, p.
84)
In the realm of mathematics education, Guitérrez (2013) explained that “while many mathematics educators are comfortable with including social and cultural aspects in their work, most are not so willing to acknowledge that teaching and learning mathematics are not politically neutral activities” (p. 4). In adopting a socio-political and post- structuralist stance, she challenged mainstream conceptualizations that view mathematics as an all-positive, unchanging, unquestioned field of study. Instead, she argued, “there is no ‘absolute’ form of mathematics that can be transferred to others” (p. 11). Such progressive scholarship can provide mainstream STEM education with a mirror for critical reflexivity, and in so doing, advance the fundamental purposes of STEM education in alignment with a social justice agenda.
While recognizing the importance of STEM in relation to economic well-being, this dissertation study contests any approach to schooling in which free-market capitalistic interests heavily inform policies and reify an autonomous view of STEM literacy. Instead, the study argues for reforms that align with a pluralist, Freirian perspective that conceptualizes the purpose of education as the practice of democracy, rejecting the neoliberal idea that unfettered capitalism constitutes such practice. Moreover, this dissertation study aligns with the work of the aforementioned STEM education scholars
(e.g., Southerland, 2000; Gutiérrez, 2013) who argue for expansive socio-cultural and
6 socio-politicial conceptualizations of STEM learning. This stance serves to interrogate the domainant, epistemic universalism of the mainstream STEM movement at the expense of other ways of knowing and being in the world (Southerland, 2000). In particular, it explores the role and purpose of the arts in the preparation of STEM educators. This inquiry has the potential to advance STEM-related education knowledge. As Southerland
(2000) explained, mainstream definitions of the sciences are superficial in part because of how they distinguish themselves from other ways of understanding the world, such as ways of knowing that characterize the arts. This inquiry thus seeks to position the integration of art—a domain whose aims are indisputably different from those of the sciences (Kuhn, 1977)—into STEM subjects as part of a larger agenda for pluralism, equity, diversity and social justice in all aspects of education. From this perspective, much is at stake in advancing knowledge of Art-STEM integration. As Freire (1970/2000) argued,
Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world. (p. 34)
Thus, while this dissertation study focuses on the perspectives of science and mathematics teachers rather than on the perspectives of Project ASPIRE’s arts collaborators, its commitment to Freirian principles create new possibilities for interdisciplinary teaching and learning which resist the ongoing exploitation of schooling, teachers, and students by the narcissistic dimensions of a neoliberal agenda.
7
Situating STEM in the Obama era.
“One of the things that I’ve been focused on as President is how we create an all-hands-on-deck approach to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics… We need to make this a priority to train an army of new teachers in these subject areas, and to make sure that all of us as a country are lifting up these subjects for the respect that they deserve.”
President Barack Obama Third Annual White House Science Fair, April 2013
On March 13, 2010, the U. S. Department of Education released the Obama
Administration’s Blueprint for Reform: The Reauthorization of the Elementary and
Secondary Education Act (ESEA). The Blueprint outlined the Administration’s priorities for the continuance of ESEA, the national education law established in 1965 as part of the
Johnson Administration’s War on Poverty. From its origin through its seven reauthorizations (including the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002), ESEA has been the largest single source of federal funding for educationally vulnerable school children
(Thomas & Brady, 2005). The initial ESEA legislation and each of its subsequent reauthorizations all reflect the legal, legislative, political, economic, and social circumstances defining the United States’ school reform landscape. When the Obama
Administration released its proposal for the seventh reauthorization of ESEA in 2010, over $300 million in STEM education funding was allocated to states and districts, particularly those considered high need
(http://www2.ed.gov/policy/elsec/leg/blueprint/blueprint.pdf). The support for STEM education was contextualized in relation to the official overarching aim of the U.S. education system. The Blueprint articulated that goal as follows: 8 The goal for America’s educational system is clear: Every student should graduate from high school ready for college and a career. Every student should have meaningful opportunities to choose from upon graduation from high school. (U.S. Department of Education, 2010)
Several months after the Blueprint was released, over 100 U.S. CEOs joined
Obama at the White House to launch “Change the Equation”, a CEO-led nonprofit organization that promised to improve STEM education as an investment in their business and the economy, all through “innovative and effective company-led programs”, according to a description of the program released by the new nonprofit through marketing titan, Ogilvy & Mather (http://www.changetheequation.org/press/president-obama- launches-change-equation). As the organization’s homepage unambiguously states,
“STEM is our business” (changetheequation.org). Backing up the Administration’s stance that educated STEM workers are key to the nation’s global competitiveness, the U.S.
Government, through its various agencies (most notably the U.S. Department of Education and the National Science Foundation) spent approximately $3.4 billion in STEM education during the 2009-10 school year (http://www.stemreports.com/wp- content/uploads/2012/04/costem__federal_stem_education_portfolio_report.pdf). These various funds stream primarily through thirteen government agencies, three of which dedicate at least ten percent of their research and development funding budgets to the
STEM education effort. Those three agencies are the National Science Foundation, the
U.S. Department of Education, and the Health and Human Services Department
(http://www.stemreports.com/wpcontent/uploads/2012/04/costem__federal_stem_educatio n_portfolio_report.pdf, p 10).
9 The enormous investments in STEM education do not end there. In fact, government spending represents a fraction of the vast resources poured into a widespread effort aimed at schooling a next generation of innovators with the capacity to maintain the nation’s economic competitiveness on a global scale. For example, Obama’s 2009
“Educate to Innovate” initiative not only seeded Change the Equation, it also spearheaded an “all hands on deck” approach to enhancing STEM education that has involved countless networks, councils, and caucuses all brimming with a mix of K-12 teachers and administrators, higher education representatives, nonprofit workers, and government and business leaders.
The most prominent businessperson involved in the STEM education movement is undoubtedly Bill Gates. In his 2008 testimony before the Committee on Science and
Technology in the United States House of Representatives, Gates urged the Government to join together with the private and nonprofit sector in addressing the nation’s marked shortfall of scientists and engineers and the general lack of research needed to fuel innovation (http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/exec/billg/speeches/2008/ congress.aspx). Advocating for the America COMPETES Act, which included significant funding for the National Science Foundation’s education and training programs, Gates highlighted his ongoing support—through both Microsoft and the Bill and Melinda Gates
Foundation—of STEM education. At that time, the Foundation had already invested nearly $2 billion in U.S. high schools and close to the same amount ($1.7 billion) in college scholarship programs to support Gates’ STEM agenda
(http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/exec/billg/speeches/2008/congress.aspx).
Currently, the Gates Foundation Trust endowment equals $39.6 billion, and it has already
10 made close to the same amount in awards since its inception (gatesfoundation.org). By founding the world’s largest software company, thereby ushering in the digital age, Gates is widely celebrated as the embodiment of the power of innovation. Moreover, given his commitment to the eradication of poverty through the Foundation’s large investments in education, technology, and healthcare, Gates and his perspectives on where and how education dollars should be spent have been well received by many policy makers on the local, state, and national levels. However, others have expressed concern about the degree of influence over education that Gates and his fellow members of the “billionaire boys club” (Greenblatt, 2011) currently exact. The former present of the National Education
Association (the nation’s largest teachers’ union) explained, “it is reasonable that people are starting to raise concerns about how this flow of money is shaping our political debate about education reform and to ask if a handful of individuals are having undue influence in one of our nation’s most important institutions” (Van Roekel cited in Greenblatt, 2011).
Barkan (2011) argued more forcefully that the Gates Foundation, working synchronously with the Eli and Edythe Broad and Walton Family Foundations, “command the field” of hundreds of philanthropic organizations that together spend several billions of dollars every year on efforts to shape K-12 education, mostly as it pertains to low-income students. She explained that “their market-based goals for overhauling public education coincide: choice, competition, deregulation, accountability, and data-based decision- making.” Barkan continued:
And they fund the same vehicles to achieve their goals: charter schools, high-stakes standardized testing for students, merit pay for teachers whose students improve their test scores, firing teachers and closing schools when scores don’t rise adequately, and longitudinal data collection on the performance of every student and teacher. Other foundations—Ford,
11 Hewlett, Annenberg, Milken, to name just a few—often join in funding one project or another, but the education reform movement’s success so far has depended on the size and clout of the Gates-Broad-Walton triumvirate. (Barkan, 2011)
In reference to Gates and the Gates Foundation, in particular, Klonsky (2010) described the issue as follows:
Gates funding was so large and so widespread, it seemed for a time as if every initiative in the small-schools and charter world was being underwritten by the foundation. If you wanted to start a school, hold a meeting, organize a conference, or write an article in an education journal, you first had to consider Gates. (p. 31)
Regardless of the problems directly related to organizing K-12 public education reform according to a capitalist agenda and associated market-based model, Gates’ clarion call to prioritize STEM is supported by alarming statistics that indicate an ever-widening gap between industry’s rapidly growing need for STEM-proficient workers and the low levels of STEM proficiency among America’s youth. For example, Vivian Pickard (2013),
President of General Motors Foundation, pointed out that STEM jobs will grow by 17 percent within the next five years. However, currently only 16 percent of American high school seniors are proficient in STEM subjects and interested in filling those jobs
(http://www.huffingtonpost.com/vivian-r-pickard/as-stem-graduate-rates- de_b_3744718.html). According to a 2012 U.S. News and World Report, 2 to 3 million jobs are currently unfilled due to a lack of individuals adequately proficient in various technical skills (Kelly, 2012). The implications of such statistics on both an individual and societal level are enormous and lend credence to the stance that our education system must place absolute priority on cultivating 21st-century STEM workforce skills (Daugherty,
2013).
12 STEM backlash and the rise of the STEAM movement. Despite consensus on the need for increased student success in STEM, a broad coalition of the government, industry and the nonprofit sectors, and the vast resources dedicated to addressing the persistent problem of U.S. student under-performance in science and mathematics, the
STEM movement has suffered a backlash for a perceived disciplinary self-focus and homogenized worldview.1 Proponents of the arts in education have been particularly critical of STEM’s self-defined narrow scope, which ostensibly precludes the arts, humanities, and social sciences. Their cries of protest have coalesced into the credo that adding an “A” (for art) to the movement will give it some “STEAM” (See, e.g., http://stemtosteam.org; Daugherty, 2013; Devaney, 2013). As a result, one of the prominent, and somewhat unlikely, “hands” on the deck to respond to Obama’s call to action became the arts.
Acknowledging that the arts have a place in education and seeking to capitalize on their special ability to foster creativity, a small but growing coalition of arts and non- arts specialists have actively taken up the STEAM mantle. Anxious not to be left out of the STEM equation, arts advocates have rallied together, giving birth to a host of networks, councils and caucuses, all brimming with individuals and organizations anxious to specifically include the arts in the STEM movement At the beginning of 2013,
Congresswoman Suzanne Bonamici (D-OR) spearheaded the launch within the United
States Congress of a bipartisan STEAM Caucus aimed at bolstering the growing effort to
1 Due in part to its success as a movement, STEM has come to be seen by many as a specific, monolithic domain. This identity persists at the same time that, as Daugherty points out, “[i]t is not clear whether, when referring to STEM, individuals are addressing any of the four subjects or those areas in which all four disciplines overlap. (Daugherty 2013, 10) For purposes of this study, I define STEM as a single discipline and discuss my reasons for so doing in Chapter 2. 13 increase the arts’ role in STEM teaching and learning. Moreover, the National Science
Foundation (NSF) has begun to offer grant funding for arts-integrated STEM education programs. In March 2011, the NSF funded a high-profile conference in the San Francisco
Bay Area, which focused on the “history, practice and value of the arts as a means of inquiring into the natural world” (McDougall, Beven & Semper, 2011, p. 5). The conference was entitled “Art as a Way of Knowing” and lent support to the idea that art is valuable to STEM as an alternate way of seeing, and therefore understanding, the world
(Daugherty, 2013). Then, in September 2012, the NSF awarded $2.6 million dollars to business consultant and STEAM advocate Harvey Steifter to investigate the integration of science and arts-based “informal” (a.k.a. “after-school” and/or “extra curricular”) learning in the interest of fostering innovation (Eger, 2011). During this same time, John
Maeda, former President of the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) rose to national and international prominence as the foremost STEAM advocate, advancing the perspective that art and design, as critical innovation strategies, are 21st-century economic drivers that must be centered in K-12 education and research policy (Robelen, 2011, http://www.bmfenterprises.com/aep-arts/wp-content/uploads/
2012/02/Ed-Week-STEM-to-STEAM.pdf and steamtosteam.org). This argument emphasizes the applied dimensions of design in engineering contexts at the same time it reinforces the argument that people who engage in the arts develop unique cognitive capacities (based on research emphasizing that creativity is housed primarily in the right side of the brain, which might grow through arts-based activities, see Daughterty, 2013).
14 The Need for STEM-Art Research
As STEAM has gathered steam across the country, officially designated
“STEAM” schools, districts, and professional development opportunities have also begun to multiply (See e.g., http://web.elkin.k12.nc.us/?p=4731, http://www.steamedu.com, and http://www.kentucky.com/2013/06/30/2699284/fayette-county-school-districts.html).
With the emerging prominence of STEAM, various stakeholders have begun to carve out areas of expertise in the realm by, for example, creating K-12 STEAM-related certifications, claiming authorship of “STEAM” as a name and as a concept, and trumpeting STEAM’s benefits through various online and print platforms. A search for literature on the topic uncovered a preponderance of white papers, upbeat news articles, and enthusiastic practitioner descriptions of STEAM success in the classroom. There is, however, a marked dearth of research-based work on the topic. This paucity of scholarship seems only logical, given the very short time since STEAM’s rise in popularity—a condition that inherently precludes in-depth, longitudinal inquiry (at this point in time). Another explanation for the lack of research is the movement’s occupation of that liminal space outside traditional disciplinary boundaries. As Boix Mansilla (2006) pointed out, interdisciplinarity and interdisciplinary research lie at the center of contemporary knowledge societies, yet they lack both a cohesive definition and grounding in systematic, empirical study. Given the urgent call to prepare the rising generation of STEM knowledge workers at all costs and through every relevant means— including arts-based pathways—it seems imperative that greater focus be given to
STEM-Art interdisciplinary education endeavors and what they might reveal through rigorous, methodical, research-based examination.
15 Arts integration from a STEM perspective. Despite recognizing the importance of artistic creative processes in fostering skills such as perspective taking, divergent thinking, and multi-modal communication, many STEM education stakeholders have struggled to determine how the arts achieve those aims in science and mathematics classrooms, or how they can inform content and link to students’ STEM achievement.
While it has been recognized and well documented that art can be a powerful tool to engage students in STEM topics (see, e.g., Stack, 2007; Bopegedera, 2005), there are currently few empirically based frameworks, protocols, and measures that provide reliable guidance for substantive STEM-Art integration that fosters STEM mastery, particularly at the secondary level and by learners whose epistemological orientations do not fit easily within mainstream STEM’s positivist paradigm. This dissertation study addresses the need for such research by exploring a STEM-Arts integration approach to teacher learning, which emphasized student engagement, STEM content mastery, authentic arts experiences, pluralist meaning-making strategies, and differentiating content and pedagogy to meet the needs of all learners in secondary science and mathematics classrooms. As will be described throughout this dissertation, Project ASPIRE’s approach to STEM-Art integration advances both practical and theoretical understanding of how secondary science and mathematics teachers can (1) honor and leverage the unique skills, knowledge, processes and epistemologies associated with both the STEM and arts disciplines and (2) honor and leverage the perspectives of all learners. From this perspective, the approach constitutes an equity-oriented perspective on STEM-Art integration and seeks to disrupt the domainant STEM movement’s tendency to position the arts as a handmaiden to the STEM agenda as well as the frequent claim by arts
16 advocates that the arts are somehow the savior of students’ academic experience (Quinn &
Kahne, 2001; Eisner, 2002). As such, this dissertation study’s approach to STEM-Art integration reflects Project ASPIRE’s commitment to honoring difference in all of its forms and to disrupting the systematized monolingual, white, European-American, positivistic assumptions embedded in the institution of American education. Achieving these ends is a fundamental component of equitable education. Equitable education requires that all students be provided with opportunities to develop conceptual understandings and skills through multiple ways of engaging with content. Those opportunities must honor and center the repertoires of practices (Gutiérrez & Rogoff,
2003) that students develop in their lives outside the classroom (Moschkovich, 2013).
While this argument has been advanced primarily in relation to students’ racial, gender, sexual, ethnic and religious identities, this dissertation study argues that disciplinary orientation or affinity constitutes another form of identity, which must be honored in relation to equitable engagement with content.
STEM+Art in urban contexts: Building the deck for a new STEM workforce.
In the previous section, I described a range of current efforts to undertake an “all-hands- on-deck” approach to STEM education and STEM workforce preparation. The following section provides the context for the kind of “hands” that might be needed and how they might be leveraged in making that deck a just, equitable and, ultimately, viable one.
Given the ongoing social, economic and political oppression of historically marginalized groups in America, it is not surprising that members of those groups disproportionately contribute to the deficit in the nation’s STEM workforce (Fuselier &
Jackson, 2010; Rosser & Taylor, 2008; Slovacek, Peterfreund, Kuehn, Whittinghill,
17 Tucker, Rath & Reinke, 2011). Not only is this deficit a barrier to realizing the full potential of the nation’s STEM-related capacities, it also strengthens the socio-economic status quo by dramatically narrowing the range of individuals who have access to meaningful participation in the emerging STEM-driven global economy. This state of affairs makes addressing the gap between the STEM academic achievement by dominant versus subjugated group members an urgent priority, and it also necessitates rigorous interrogation of the ideological assumptions embedded in all STEM-related education initiatives. To do otherwise, risks bolstering, rather than dismantling, the forces of hegemony, which have traditionally conceptualized STEM success narrowly constrained access to high quality mathematics and science instruction and resources, and ignored the cultural competencies of historically marginalized, chronically under-resourced youth.
Due to the macro political, economic and social forces (such as deindustrialization, middle-class flight to the suburbs and systemic racism) that shape the geographies of U.S. society, the majority of those youth live in urban areas. Young people belonging to historically marginalized groups (particularly young people of color) are, therefore, disproportionately impacted by the failures of the public school system, and “urban school” has been become a marker of race and poverty (Noguera, 2008). Therefore, any attempt to address the academic achievement of urban youth, whether STEM-related or otherwise, must interrogate structural issues related to the role of schooling in social reproduction.
My dissertation inquires into how secondary science and mathematics teachers of urban students can participate in the disruption of hegemonic forces through the practice of STEM-Art integration. Focusing on this aspect of schooling is particularly important,
18 because not only are such teachers currently employed as educators of the STEM disciplines, they are arguably one of the most significant factors in determining whether, and to what degree, urban youth succeed within the STEM workforce of the future. As such, urban STEM teachers are powerful mediators of their students’ acquisition of hegemonically determined cultural competencies in the STEM fields and, therefore, of their access to participation in emerging global wealth systems (Grimberg & Gummer,
2013). Audre Lorde (1984), however, argued that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” (Lorde, 1984). In other words, oppression cannot be overthrown with the same logic that makes oppression possible. Lorde (1984) advanced this argument in a powerful critique of dominant feminist discourses of the 1970s and 1980s, which, as she explained, were organized around the false assumption that all women shared the same perspectives. In naming the heterosexual and racial biases embedded in the dominant movement (led by white, middle-class female academics), Lorde (1984) demonstrated not only the ethical importance of embracing difference, but also the necessity of difference in disrupting inequitable systems. Following this logic, an authentic diversification of participation in STEM requires not just acquisition of hegemonically determined tools, but also a critical consciousness (Freire, 1970/2000) about how STEM and the STEM disciplines have been shaped by culture, politics, and power. Freire argued that the purpose of education was to support students in taking control of their own lives through experiences that were directly relevant (i.e., culturally relevant) to them. However, the current education system largely served as a mechanism by which the dominant culture was imprinted on all students. Burawoy (2012) reasoned that resisting hegemony in education involved both the induction of oppressed group members into dominant culture
19 and the development of an alternative pedagogy grounded in the lived experience of the oppressed. Approaching STEM education and STEM-Art integration from this perspective simultaneously creates the possibility of increased access to material resources, a strategy for dismantling the hegemonic dimensions of mainstream STEM education, and a pathway for meaningful participation in STEM by all learners. This perspective is consistent with Freire’s (1970/2000) vision of education as a site of critical consciousness and also with bell hooks’ (1994) conceptualization of education as the practice of freedom.
STEM and multicultural education. A term characterized by inconsistent usage, multicultural education is applied broadly to pedagogical approaches that recognize, honor, and center all learners’ culturally bound knowledge and sense-making processes. In an attempt to establish consistency and to correct misconceptions in the field, Banks
(1993) advanced five tenets to serve as foundational benchmarks that both explain and delineate the scope of multicultural education. These included (1) content integration, (2) the knowledge construction process, (3) prejudice reduction, (4) equity pedagogy and (5) an empowering school culture and social structure (Banks, 1993; see also Banks & Banks,
1995). Banks’ fourth component, equity pedagogy, is particularly salient for this dissertation study—a study that explores issues that emerge when individuals with distinctly different cultural and epistemological orientations (e.g., art and STEM) form a hybridized space of interdisciplinary engagement to address the STEM learning needs of a diverse and underserved urban student population. Banks and Banks (1995) defined equity pedagogy as “teaching strategies and classroom environments that help students from diverse racial, ethnic, and cultural groups attain the knowledge, skills and attitudes needed
20 to function effectively within, and help create and perpetuate, a just, humane, and democratic society” (Banks & Banks, 1995, p. 152).
While the definition of art has been debated for thousands of years, there is consensus among many progressive arts educators that art is the aesthetic embodiment of personal sense-making experiences whose boundaries exceed the limits of the literal
(Eisner, 2002b; Polanyi, 1966; Dewey, 1934). With its embrace of the subjective and, therefore, its inherently pluralist stance, art offers a unique pathway to actualizing equity pedagogy in STEM. Therefore, the rejection of mainstream STEM’s dominant
“technicized cognitive culture” (Eisner, 2002b, p.8) by educators who employ instructional methods anchored in students’ personally relevant, aesthetically oriented, expressive sense-making can be considered the enactment of equity pedagogy.
Following Banks and Banks’ (1995) seminal essay on equity pedagogy two decades ago, scholars have drawn on the concept to disrupt the increasingly inequitable education landscape that has coincided with the rise of STEM as a movement and the rapidly accelerating process of globalization (Zajda, 2011). For example, Tobin (2011) attributed pervasive pedagogical inequity within science education to the ways in which industry and policy leaders who shape the forces of globalization as well as the standards- based accountability movement have mediated the design of both curriculum and instructional approaches. Tan and Barton (2012) explained that equity in science and mathematics education means more than simply equal treatment (access) and equal outcome (test results).
Cohen and Lotan’s (1995) study on collaboration as an instructional strategy for urban elementary students reinforced the dire need for educators who actively disrupt
21 instructional practices in classrooms of “mixed status students” (p. 104). In these settings, the authors found that self-fulfilling stratification processes impeded both the participation and effort of low status students, producing severe inequalities (Cohen & Lotan, 1995).
Mack’s (2012) findings in EFL classrooms support the argument that student participation, or lack thereof, correlates directly with social inclusion, the audibility of student voice, and teaching methodologies. In this context, equity pedagogy is characterized as a pedagogy of participation (Mack, 2012).
Teaching for participation and engagement in STEM is critical to the actualization of equity and justice. White males have long dominated STEM fields and although numerous efforts in recent years have been made to diversify participation in STEM, members of under-represented groups have not readily flourished within them (Fuselier &
Jackson, 2010; Rosser & Taylor, 2008; Slovacek et al., 2011). In STEM, therefore, equity pedagogy begins by recognizing that schools commonly reinforce principles and practices that maintain the primacy of STEM’s normative values and forms of participation
(Carolone, 2004). The consequences are dire. For example, Tobin describes how globalization processes shape, reproduce, and legitimize education inequities through neoliberal, hegemonic schooling mechanisms such as the standardization of curricula and its accompanying accountability movement. These mechanisms severely limit the economic opportunities available to non-mainstream students (urban youth, in particular) and result in the creation of an economic superclass that excludes them (Tobin, 2011).
Zajda (2011) explored the nuances of this argument, claiming that neoliberal ideologies found in much of mainstream science education are bound up in existing economic and social stratification that privileges and oppresses groups of people based on
22 more commonly discussed characteristics, such as class, race, ethnicity, gender, religion, etc. Along these lines, numerous progressive scholars call into question the traditional
STEM depiction of non-dominant epistemological and ontological approaches to the content as antithetical to the STEM disciplines and their (normative) practices (Tan &
Barton, 2012; Meyer & Crawford, 2011; Turner & Strawhun, 2007; Southerland, 2000,
Martin, 2000). As members of racially, ethnically, and culturally diverse groups increasingly come into contact with each other through the forces of globalization, it thus becomes imperative for education to revise its systems, curricula and pedagogies in ways that honor differences among students (and among students and teachers) within physical and digital classroom spaces. As Grimberg and Gummer (2013) pointed out, “culture and education confront each other when education becomes the vector of one hegemonic culture” (p. 13). Understanding, then, how culture, pedagogy and STEM disciplinary empowerment interact in heterogeneous learning spaces is of fundamental importance for all students’ meaningful participation in education as the practice of freedom. It requires recognition and interrogation of issues of power, including whose knowledge counts and where that knowledge comes from, especially in urban schools and in disciplines that are structurally and culturally privileged over others by officially sanctioned objectivist truth claims (Delpit, 1995).
The ASPIRE Project
As I noted at the outset of this chapter, this dissertation is part of Project ASPIRE, which was funded by a $12.9 million Teacher Quality Partnership grant (Award No.
U336S090049, Office of Innovation and Improvement, U.S. Department of Education,
2009-15). Project ASPIRE was created by The Ohio State University (OSU), Columbus 23 City Schools (CCS), and various community partners in response to the lack of highly qualified science, mathematics and world language teachers in the district. Together, the partners built a model teacher education program around the key notion of consistent, evidence-based, guided apprenticeships that support new teachers in pre-service and post- hiring settings. One of the strategies involved providing robust professional development to highly qualified veteran teachers who would serve primarily as field-placement mentors to the pre-service teachers. Another was the creation of “incubator” spaces in which relevant innovative ideas could be prototyped, tested, and revised. The most promising ideas were then examined for their applicability and woven into the Project’s sustainability efforts.
The specific focus of this dissertation is one of ASPIRE’s most successful incubators: the Innovative Curriculum Design Team (ICDT), which was facilitated by one of the grant’s partners, an arts education organization with expertise in interdisciplinarity and arts-integration within formal and informal education settings. The organization was charged with helping teachers foster rich, high-level thinking to drive student creativity, imagination, and innovation (Project ASPIRE submission, 2009, p.
23). As director of that organization, and, therefore, director of the ICDT, I worked with
Project ASPIRE’s principal investigator, district administrators, several university faculty members, and my organization’s arts educators (including teaching artists) to design learning experiences and an inquiry environment in which cooperating teachers could explore ideas that were new to them, engage in meaningful arts-based collaborations, develop curricula and pedagogical methods new to their professional practices, and participate in the dissemination of the group’s innovations.
24 Purpose of the Study
As mentioned above, this dissertation study seeks to advance equity in education.
More specifically, it aims to develop and present research-based findings about the ICDT that are pertinent to the national STEM and STEAM dialogue. In it, I examine how
STEM teachers of middle and high school students approach integrating art into their professional practice and their urban classrooms. Recognizing the inherent diversity of all classroom contexts yet seeking to uncover consistencies that bridge individual experiences, the dissertation focuses on four teachers working in several different under- performing schools across Project ASPIRE’s partner school district. Those teachers were all part of Project ASPIRE and the ICDT for at least three years. Based on the experience of these teachers and using an ethnographic case study approach, the dissertation addresses the following research question: How might teachers at the secondary level adopt substantive arts-integrated approaches in their mathematics and science teaching practices? To that end, the following sub-questions guide the inquiry:
1. What influenced the study participants to explore arts integration in their middle and high school-level classrooms?
2. What are the characteristics of the teachers who demonstrate an enduring commitment to arts-integration?
Organization of the Dissertation
This dissertation is organized into five chapters. The first chapter is intended to provide an overview and context for the study as well as establish its critical stance. In
Chapter 2, I review literature relevant to how I examine and situate the Project ASPIRE
ICDT. That literature includes a very brief discussion of Vygotsky’s socio-cultural theory
25 in order to locate my dissertation within that broad framework. Then, I explore a particular outgrowth of Vygotsky’s ideas—Communities of Practice Theory (Lave &
Wenger, 1991)—which is the specific framework I use to conceptualize how teachers can develop a shared culture around the practice of STEM-Art integration in the interest of contributing to teacher education reform. I also review scholarship on teacher inquiry as a theoretical stance (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1993, 1999, 2009) to understand, from an epistemological perspective, how STEM teacher learning might contribute to education research. Next, I review literature on interdisciplinarity and, in particular, on STEM-Art interdisciplinarity. These three main theoretical areas, and their relevant bodies of literature, allow me to round out my conceptual framework in a way that aligns with the specific mission and activities of the ICDT. From there, I explore literature pertaining to the intersections I identified between each of the three areas. Those intersections are: collaboration theory, design-inquiry, and apprenticeship theory. This admittedly complicated conceptual framework both reflects the complexity of the phenomenon under investigation, and raises the question of what binds the three theoretical frames together in the context of STEM-Art integration. Addressing my research questions will allow me to answer this larger theoretical question and propose a new framework for
STEM-Art interdisciplinarity.
To achieve this theory-building goal, I have used an ethnographic case study approach, which is described in Chapter 3. In addition to presenting the context of the study as well as my particular role as a participant-observer, I make clear my data collection methods. Then, I explain how I selected the study’s four cases and outline my data analysis process. I describe my multi-faceted coding process, which allowed me to
26 discern patterns and discordances within and across the experiences of the research participants. In Chapter 4, I discuss those patterns and discordances, which I use to support my findings about the nature of STEM-Art integration in the study’s context. The implications of my findings for larger STEM/STEM-Art and urban education conversations are discussed in Chapter 5.
Collectively, the five chapters that comprise this dissertation help me to articulate a theory of interdisciplinary teaching and learning that manifests the social justice principles embodied in Project ASPIRE and offers an equity-oriented approach to STEM-
Art integration, which fosters collaboration by decolonizing territories of knowledge.
27
Chapter 2:
Sociocultural Lenses for Interdisciplinary Teaching and Learning
A Sanskrit word appeared in the paragraph: antevasin. It means, ‘one who lives at the border.’ In ancient times, this was a literal description. It indicated a person who had left the bustling center of worldly life to go live at the edge of the forest where the spiritual masters dwelled. The antevasin was not of the villager’s anymore-not a householder with a conventional life. But neither was he yet a transcendent-not one of those sages who live deep in the unexplored woods, fully realized. The antevasin was an in-betweener. He was a border-dweller. He lived in sight of both worlds, but he looked toward the unknown. (Gilbert, 2006)
This dissertation is about moving. It is about moving inward and outward, upward and downward, and across borders and boundaries, to the unknown and then back again to the familiar—by a group of teachers (the members of Project ASPIRE’s ICDT) who collectively embarked on a multi-year inquiry to become education border-dwellers.
Working together in a high-stakes testing environment, the teachers’ movements disrupted the well-documented trend of detrimental changes in teacher practice associated with the era of test-based accountability policy. Those documented changes in practice include an increased instructional focus on tested subject areas at the expense of non- tested subject areas, a significant allotment of classroom time dedicated to narrow test preparation activities with little enduring value related to authentic content mastery, and, ultimately, a reduction in pedagogical risk-taking that support innovation and transformation in teacher and student thinking (Rothstein, Jacobsen and Wilder, 2008;
Koretz, 2008; Hannaway and Hamilton, 2008; Dee, Jacob, Hoxby and Ladd, 2010).
28 Instead, by virtue of an intensive inquiry whose goal was to produce a new model of urban teacher preparation, the teachers came to occupy a space at the border between their respective disciplines (science, mathematics, and world languages) and the discipline of visual art. They were asked to spend time planning new instructional and assessment approaches that would go well beyond the narrow confines of standardized testing. Then, they were asked to put these approaches into practice in their classrooms with no guarantee that they would not negatively impact their or their students’ performance on mandated measures, for which they remained accountable. To do this, they were tasked with exploring the unfamiliar (to them) domain of visual art for its applicability to their instructional practices. In so doing, they were forced to critically reflect upon their disciplinary-bound assumptions about the nature of knowledge.
Ultimately, this reflexive exploration situated them in a border-dwelling position, from where they could gaze simultaneously at the familiar conventions of their disciplines and the art domain in which they had become peripheral participants (Lave & Wenger, 1991).
In this sense, the teachers no longer belonged wholly to one disciplinary “tribe” (Becher,
2001) or another. For this reason, their work in this space offers valuable insight into the shifting contours of the disciplines and the implications for interdisciplinary knowledge and practice.
As is the case with physical territories, disciplinary boundaries demarcate and delimit what is acceptable in a given domain. By implication, they also define whose knowledge, practices, and ways of thinking counts and whose is excluded. This has the result of reifying, through discourses of authenticity and inauthenticity, people’s disciplinary identities (Gilbert, 2007). Borders thus function “as an order of
29 subjectification” (Gilbert, 2007, p. 86), whereby individuals operate in the calculable spaces defined by the boundaries (Dillon, 1995) which are determined by historical, structural, and ideological forces. Disciplinary boundary shifting and border dwelling by educators seeking to expand their practice, particularly in the interest of serving historically marginalized groups, thus falls under the umbrella of what Giroux (1990) described as a “border pedagogy of postmodern resistance” (p. 165). He argued:
[b]order pedagogy is a form of critical pedagogy that “offers the opportunity for students to engage the multiple references that constitute different cultural codes, experiences and languages. This means educating students not only to read these codes critically but also to learn the limits of such codes, including the ones they use to construct their own narratives and histories. (p. 166)
Giroux further explained that learning to read multiple codes entails a realization that the borders of knowledge are socially created and unequally situated in terms of socio- political, economic, and cultural capital. Negotiating territories of knowledge is, therefore, a performance of identity, which is both limited and enabled according to coordinates of power. Emphasizing the agentive dimensions of critical pedagogy, Giroux
(1990) argued that disrupting hegemonic assumptions within the organization of knowledge systems meant that the terrain of learning was “inextricably linked to the shifting parameters of place, identity, history, and power.” (p. 166)
The teachers who participated in Project ASPIRE’s ICDT, and especially the four who are this dissertation study’s participants, ultimately destabilized, reshaped, and remapped the terrain of learning as it pertains to interdisciplinary urban education. The review of literature in this chapter attempts to situate the journey of this study’s band of
30 education border dwellers within a theoretical landscape where their movements make sense and have meaning in the larger context of teaching and learning.
Introduction to the Theoretical Framework
To understand the nuances of how the study’s participants crossed disciplinary boundaries to create a new space of STEM-Art hybridity, I adopt a critical theoretical stance grounded in Vygotsky’s (1930-1934/1978) sociocultural theory. This theoretical stance—paired with a conceptual approach to understanding practitioner inquiry (e.g.,
Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009) and participation in professional learning communities
(e.g., Lave & Wenger, 1991)—allows me to think expansively about the nature of interdisciplinarity. It also helps me to consider perspectives not accounted for by previous interdisciplinary research (e.g., Apostel, Berger, Briggs & Michaud, 1972; Becher, 1989;
Klein, 1990). To this end, I have built a conceptual framework that unites current theories of interdisciplinarity (including STEM-Art integration), the concept of inquiry as both a process and an epistemological stance, and Communities of Practice theory (Lave &
Wenger, 1991). The framework is admittedly complex, and it becomes more so when I draw on three other theories (apprenticeship theory, design-inquiry, and theories of collaboration), which are situated at the intersections of the first three. Taken together, however, these frameworks allow me to address my central research question of how secondary mathematics and science teachers might adopt arts-integrated pedagogical methods. Moreover, they allow me to address that question in a manner consistent with
Project ASPIRE’s overarching structural components (incubating innovation through dedicated teacher inquiry groups) and its larger research design (viewing learning as situated in Communities of Practice). 31 There are many ways these theories inform each other, and they do not lead neatly from one to the next. Instead, they constitute what Barker, Nancarrow, and Spackman
(2001), in the context of marketing research, described as an “informed eclecticism” (p.
27) whereby different theories, models, and metaphors from a range of disciplines can be joined to generate greater insight into issues. This is a particularly appropriate approach for this dissertation study on the integration of STEM and art, as it has been argued that informed eclecticism is endemic to interdisciplinary endeavors (Boix Mansilla, 2006).
Figure 1 illustrates the three main theories I bring to bear on this study, and it showcases the cyclical, dynamic nature of the theoretical model guiding this study.
Interdisciplinarity Inquiry
Communities of Practice
Figure 1. Theoretical Model
To explain the conceptual model, I begin with a brief discussion of socio-cultural theory’s core ideas, and then I situate Communities of Practice theory (Lave & Wenger,
1991) under its umbrella. Communities of Practice theory provides me with a lens for
32 examining how the individuals in my dissertation study became part of an intellectually cohesive, praxis-oriented group in which their knowledge about STEM-Art interdisciplinarity was (and continues to be) constructed. From there, I discuss relevant theories of inquiry in the context of teacher professional development. Then, I discuss theories of interdisciplinarity, with a focus on the integration of the STEM and art disciplines. After addressing these three main theoretical frames, I consider the intersections of each of these using apprenticeship theory, the concept of design-inquiry, and, finally, theories of collaboration and participation.
Situating the Research: Sociocultural Theory
Sociocultural theory originates in the work of Lev Vygotsky, a post-Revolutionary
Russian psychologist who developed his profoundly influential theory of human cognition in order to both describe and explain higher-order psychological functions in a manner acceptable within the early 20th-century, positivist-oriented domain of natural science
(Vygotsky, 1978; Cole & Scribner, 1978). Drawing on Marxist theory and, specifically, the idea that people are active agents who exist in a mutually constitutive relationship with history (they shape history and are, in turn, shaped by it), Vygotsky sought to identify underlying brain mechanisms that would explain children’s thinking (Moll, 2014). The most groundbreaking aspects of his theory emanate from his descriptions of how an individual’s cultural environments are definitional to thinking (Cole & Scribner, 1978). He theorized the nature of knowledge as socially constructed, binding learning to the particular social and physical environment in which it occurs. For Vygotsky, a child’s development began externally when they encountered new experiences and used cultural tools (such as language) to make sense of those experiences on an internal, interpersonal 33 plane. Moll (2014) pointed out that this cultural mediation of cognition is not only central to Vygotskian theory, but also paradigmatic. In this way, it serves as an umbrella for all of the major ideas and themes in his work and defines all investigations carried out using his theoretical frame.
Wertsch (1991) discerned the following major themes in Vygotsky’s work: (1) individual development as originating in the social; (2) human interaction and, thus, learning as mediated by signs and symbols; and (3) learning and development as interrelated. In addition to the three themes explained by Wertsch, Moll (2014) added a fourth: “Active subjects create themselves through their social actions” (p. 30). This sociocultural perspective offers a powerful tool for disrupting purely cognitive views on learning. Cognitive views allow dominant social groups to locate achievement deficits within individuals, rather than within inequitable social systems. As Wenger (1998) explained, learning can be assumed in any environment, whether it is apparent or not. In the context of American schooling, learners whose social practices (including culturally- bound ways of knowing) are marginalized participate in dominant culture through
“processes of exclusion and subordination [that] operate locally (Toohey, 1999, p. 135).
In this sense, an individual’s success in any given domain is a function of the social roles
(and associated sign systems) available to them. Taken together, therefore, these themes underscore the human dimensions of the world we inhabit, and open the door to a critical examination of education endeavors whereby issues of individual and cultural difference can be both recognized and foregrounded.
Additionally, Wertch (2010) asserted that cultural tools can not only facilitate but also constrain individual development and action. In other words, those tools—speech,
34 written language, visual symbols, etc.—are never neutral, but rather “introduce historical and political dimensions into mental functioning and socialization” (Wertsch, 2001, p.
233). Pontecorvo (1993) explained that such politically shaped semiotic mediators are procedures, thought methodologies (i.e., ways of thinking), and cultural objects that are appropriated by an individual as s/he develops the practices, reasoning, and discourses of the social context. In this way, no account of learning or development can be understood without considering the origin of cultural tools and how they are (equitably versus inequitably) accessed (Wertsch, 2010). Vygotsky (1997) directly addressed these political dimensions of his theories when he discussed their educational and pedagogical implications. He stated:
Pedagogics is never and was never politically indifferent, since, willingly or unwillingly, through its own work on the psyche, it has always adopted a particular social pattern, political line, in accordance with the dominant social class that has guided its interests. (p. 348)
Acknowledging the inequitable power distribution of social patterns leads logically to the question of how exactly social patterns and practices are accessed and disseminated. Two key Vygotskian constructs, which I discuss below, help explain the mediated process by which cultural tools are understood and employed: the Zone of
Proximal Development (ZPD) and the More Skilled Other.
Zone of proximal development. Arguably Vygotsky’s best known concept
(Chaiklin, 2003; del Rio & Alvarez, 2007; Danish, Peppler, Phelps & Washington, 2011), the ZPD describes the range of a given learner’s competence. It is conceptualized as something of a trajectory that begins with a child’s current developmental level (what s/he can accomplish independently) and extends to that which is possible, yet only attainable,
35 with the assistance of an adult or in collaboration with a more skilled peer (Vygotsky,
1978). Children, therefore, only develop new cultural tools and knowledge when they exceed the boundaries of what they already know and extend beyond the edge of their current competence. Vygotsky used this idea to argue that the focus of teaching activities should remain in those ZPD areas where children require the assistance of others, rather than where they can already function independently.
Despite its widespread use and application, Chaiklin (2003) claimed that the ZPD as a theoretical construct has been largely misunderstood. It has most often been viewed as a task-focused construct in which a less-skilled individual acquires the ability to perform a given task through the tutelage of someone more skilled in that task. Mastery
(or cognitive development) is then indicated by the less-skilled person’s ability to perform the task independently. In this view, the ZPD is thus defined as the range of tasks that an individual can accomplish in concert with someone possessing greater skills.
However, Chaiklin (2003) advised that the ZPD involves much more, including a consideration of (1) the whole child, (2) the child’s internal, cognitive structure, (3) changes in the child’s internal structure as component of development, (4) how the child’s social situation impacts her actions, and (5) how certain activities related to a child’s age range lead to a next level of development. This broader perspective on the
ZPD is important, because it allows the concept to be utilized as part of a larger, complex theoretical framework, rather than an isolated phenomenon. This then allows researchers to take into account the many dimensions of every individual’s unique learning landscape.
36 Scaffolding by a more skilled other. The role of more skilled others in a child’s development has been often linked to the idea of “scaffolding” whereby the adult (or peer) perceives the child’s ZPD and structures a learning task appropriately. The more skilled other devises such tasks based on the child’s use of language, which is the instantiation of her otherwise unobservable ZPD (See, e.g., Morcom, 2014). This scaffolding concept has become largely synonymous with the ZPD, having been most famously employed by
Wood, Bruner and Ross (1976), and later elaborated by Bruner (1986), as a metaphor to describe how more skilled others structure learning experiences in graduated, increasingly difficult steps that result in cognitive development. Lidz (1991) explained that the more skilled other mediates the world to the child through the scaffolding process. Learning, in this view, means that the adult must discern the child’s two developmental levels, the actual and the potential in order to determine how to most appropriately provide guidance to the next potential level of development, resulting in a cognitive advancement
(Vygotsky, 1978). Children’s learning could thus only take place through interaction with other individuals who were more knowledgeable, skilled and conversant in the practices of the social context.
Vygotsky’s (1978) ideas, while originating in the realm of psychology, have had enormous implications for education and for how the role of the more skilled other (e.g., the teacher) should be conceptualized, cultivated and assessed, particularly in relation to the social context. In this dissertation study, however, it is not the adult-child relationship or the teacher-student relationship that provides the focus. Nor is it a childhood peer-to- peer relationship, as Vygotsky also envisioned. Instead, because this study examines how adults learn in concert with other adults, I am guided, in part, by an adult-focused
37 outgrowth of Vygotsky’s work: Communities of Practice theory (Lave & Wenger, 1991;
Wenger, 1998).
Communities of Practice
Lave and Wenger (1991) famously developed Vygotsky’s perspectives on the role of the social world in learning into a theory that attends specifically to the context in which the learning takes place. To explain the nature of knowledge, they first articulated a theory concerning the situatedness of learning, which powerfully refuted traditional teaching approaches in which abstract, de-contextualized knowledge absolutes are metered out to students by teachers and other authoritative sources such as textbooks.
Instead, they argued, knowledge is embodied and constructed by an individual as s/he participates with others in the activities that characterize their social milieu. This idea was further developed, resulting in a Communities of Practice theory, which Wenger (2005) located at the interface of constructivist (learner-at-the-center) and social (personal- relationships-as-primary) learning theory.
When they first introduced the idea of Communities of Practice, Lave and
Wenger (1991) described it as “a set of relations among persons, activity, and world, over time and in relation with other tangential and overlapping Communities of Practice” (p.
98). Later, when expanding the idea independently, Wenger (1998) defined the core concept of Communities of Practice as “groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly” (p.
5). Lave (2011) also developed the idea independently, exploring how real-world epistemology can offer researchers rich possibilities when positivist research methods are ineffective. Those practices are material, interwoven and organized around shared 38 understandings derived from culturally situated acts of doing (Schatzki, 2001).
Importantly, Herne (2006) pointed out that not all communities are “Communities of
Practice”. To constitute a Community of Practice, Lave and Wenger (1991) argued that three key components must be present. Those components are:
1. A shared domain: beyond a mere conglomeration of individuals, a
Community of Practice is constituted of individuals who share an
interest and are committed to that interest. In this way, they have skills,
capacities and competencies in common and that are unique to the
community.
2. A community: the group is bound together not just by a shared purpose
and set of competencies, but also by the fact that they interact with each
other, engage in activities together and form relationships between
themselves which allow them to learn, grow, and shape the community
in a mutually inflecting manner.
3. A practice: a distinctive practice or set of practices (“a shared
repertoire”) that are embodied, interwoven, and provide a means through
which members know or come to know something about the domain,
using shared experiences, tools, problem-solving strategies, etc.
A community’s practice—or repertoire of practices—includes not just language and literacy communicative habits, systems and patterns, but also the complete discourse and full range of socio-cultural practices endemic to that community (Herne, 2006). For instance, in writing about the context of a Finnish prison, Toyoki and Brown (2014) found that inmates continually drew on the prison community’s available discourses as
39 part of strategic and reflexive experiments with a developing range of possible identities
(from stigmatized to non-stigmatized). Using the idea that identities are subjectively available to individuals (Giddens, 1991; Athens, 1994), they argued that “identities are constituted within, and derived from discursive regimes that provide materials and opportunities for individuals and groups to reflexively author accounts of their selves”
(Toyoki & Brown, 2014, p. 717). This example supports the argument that immersion and participation in a Community of Practice ultimately reflect questions of identity formation.
Lattuca (2002) pointed out that the identity development process is not unidirectional, but rather that individuals and their context are mutually constitutive. This idea has found support in numerous contexts. In a study of pre-registration nurses in
Ireland, White (2010) argued that membership in a Community of Practice shapes who people are as they engage in an ongoing, mutually inflecting process. Members perform and become their new identities by engaging with and contributing to the ever-evolving set of socio-cultural practices that define the community. Engagement in hands-on, formalized learning environments such as praxis placements was critical for the production of “knowledgeable doers” (White, 2010).
The “knowing” part of coming to know something through practice indicates a dimension of reflexivity, which is central to the development of identity (Alvesson &
Willmott, 2002; Handley et al., 2006; Contu, 2014). As participants become knowledgeable, and thus, intelligible in the practices and discourses of the community, they develop ontological orientations specific to membership in that community, which, when reflected upon, are made manifest in their identities (Contu, 2014). Using a
40 definition that belies the complexity of the identity formation process, Lave and Wenger
(1991) stated simply that learning means “becoming a different person” (p. 53). Moreover, as Kim and Merriam (2010) underscored in the context of adult computer learners, all individuals belong to multiple Communities of Practice. This, they argued, helps account for the complexity of identity formation.
An important dimension of identity formation relates to epistemological orientations. As individuals use the cultural tools and engage in the social relationships and practices that characterize their multiple communities, they come to “see” the world in ways that are shared with members of the communities to which they belong (Kuhn, 1970;
Becher, 1989; Lattuca, 2002). Geiger (1990) explained that an individual’s ontological and epistemological frameworks are based on situating, locating and positioning, such that no knowledge can be universal or complete. This means that all knowledge is “marked” by the particulars of each knower’s situatedness. Haraway called this phenomenon the
“complex map of consciousness” (Haraway 1991, p. 111) in which a person is positioned.
That position is always moving, changing, and shaping the realities and values we come to know. In a study on vocational education in Australia, Hodge (2014) alluded to how a person’s shifting subjectivities impact his/her participation in a Community of Practice.
He stated, “the individual, who moves between practices, whether between compatible or incompatible ones, must carry a trace of already experienced practices” (Hodge, 2014, p.
179). Thus, the ever-evolving linkages among prior experiences, subjectivities, and group memberships are constitutive of one’s identity, always determining how one comes to see, act, and know in the world (Clark & Caffarella, 1999; Greeno & van de Sande, 2007;
White, 2010).
41 Viewing Communities of Practice in this way allows people to both understand the development of shared identities and acknowledge and account for issues of individual differences. And, while this perspective accounts for collaboration, shared understandings and cultural identity, it also avoids promoting homogenization of the “melting pot” variety, which reinforces hegemony by denying the unique cultural dimensions of anything and anyone not ultimately Eurocentric (Janzen, 2006). In fact, this stance is particularly powerful in opening the Community of Practice space for interrogating structural inequities. Smolka, De Goes, and Pino (1985) pointed out that any interaction between members of a Community of Practice can result not only in shared perspectives and mutual understanding, but also in divergence and disharmony. Along these lines, an individual’s social position in relation to that of other members must be accounted for in any critically oriented Communities of Practice framework. Thus, it is important to recognize that because individuals are constituted in relation to one another, reciprocity can entail an inverse relationship whereby the empowerment of one individual disempowers the other (Smolka et al., 1985). In this sense, a Community of Practice and its repertoires are contested sites, shaped by power and power relations where all members are conceptualized as active agents, albeit inequitably situated (Ortner, 1984). In a theoretical argument advancing a new model of personhood, Stetsenko (2012) highlighted this agentive dimension of identity formation, asserting that when individuals engage in collaborative, transformative practices, they inherently adopt an activist stance that guides their actions. This stance also lays the foundation for achieving a personhood that matters in and to the world. In this way, sociocultural theory and its outgrowths (such as
Communities of Practice theory) can align with a social justice vision of education
42 (Stetsenko, 2012). That vision advances the conviction that education’s most important goals include developing personal autonomy, learning to forge relationships across difference, and respecting the unique perspectives, experiences, and world views of all individuals (Grant, 2012).
Modes of Inquiry for Teacher Learning
As its name implies, inquiry is, at its core, a matter of questioning and investigating. Individuals who engage in inquiry construct knowledge by designing and implementing solutions to problems, thereby introducing new ideas into the world in a self-governing manner (Burgh & Yorshansky, 2011). In this dissertation study, “inquiry” is defined as a habit of mind, and “inquiry group” designates an inquiry-based form of collaborative practitioner research through which local knowledge is generated, theories are created, and theories of others are interrogated (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1993, 1999,
2009). While inquiry can be understood as a methodology or a “thing” that is done,
Cochran-Smith and Lytle’s (1993, 1999, 2009) work theorizes collective inquiry as a stance (or a worldview) adopted by groups of teachers who explore issues of their own professional practices. The overarching objective of this approach to teacher learning points to “transforming teaching, learning, leading and schooling for democratic purposes and social justice goals” (p. 119). From this point of view, inquiry moves beyond method to become a theoretical framework appropriate to the nature and focus of this study.
Therefore, I use the concept of inquiry-as-stance (Cochran-Smith and Lytle, 2009) to understand how a diverse and multidisciplinary group of urban teachers can take on the role of education border dwellers. Inquiry-as-stance thus allows me to view such border
43 dwellers as arts-integration knowledge generators whose efforts can lead to critical action and transformation in schooling (So, 2013).
Projects of inquiry. With increasingly apparent tension between industry-driven, data-centric government policies that reinforce traditional transmission models of teaching and clarion calls by the very same sectors for an educational system that prepares the next generation of creativity-driven innovators, inquiry finds itself at the nexus of a complex, and potentially productive, dialogue. Practitioners who engage in inquiry as teacher-researchers use their classrooms to grow their own pedagogical knowledge with the intent to share it with others (Hubbard & Power, 1993). Therefore, professional development in the form of teacher inquiry highlights teacher agency and aligns with the social justice principles and equity-oriented practices of participatory research more broadly. As Dana and Yendol-Silva (2003) argued, inquiry projects conducted as teacher research lead to the generation of knowledge not only about one’s own practice but also about the profession in general. Therefore, such projects hold the potential of being “critical and transformative, a perspective linked not only to high standards for the learning of all students but also to social change and social justice and to the individual and collective professional growth of teachers” (Cochran-Smith & Lytle,
2001, p. 46).
Classroom-based inquiry. As a contemporary approach to teaching and learning, inquiry is grounded in the principle that learners engage in the construction of knowledge through the asking of questions (Friedman, Crews, Caicedo, Besley, Weinberg &
Freeman, 2010; Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009; Inoue, 2011). When authentic inquiry- based learning is undertaken in classrooms, teachers are facilitators who set in motion
44 carefully designed experiences, through which students begin to pose questions about real-world phenomena that are intrinsically interesting to them. Then, the teacher guides them in a discovery process whereby the students answer their own questions and generate even more questions for further exploration. Friedman et al. (2010) described this process as a recursive cycle that moves through the following stages: ask, investigate, create, discuss, and reflect. This model has roots in the educational theories of John
Dewey who posited that learning is bound up in the social and individual context in which it occurs and that inquiry centered on the learner’s interest fosters meaningful, active and democratic engagement with ideas (Friedman et al., 2010). Reason and
Bradbury (2001) supported this position by using structuration theory “to link the individual to social structures so that both are seen to be related as chicken and egg” (p. xxvi). Inquiry at its best is, therefore, personal, communal, participatory, and liberating.
Cochran-Smith and Lytle (1999) distinguished this form of practitioner inquiry as particularly relevant to apprenticeship models of teacher education, such as Project
ASPIRE, describing them as a “knowledge-in-practice approach to teacher learning” (p.
270). This approach conceptualizes teacher learning as a collaborative classroom-based adventure in which students and teachers learn together. Teacher inquiry thus becomes a powerful form of preparation and professional development that challenges pedagogical orthodoxy (McLaughlin & Talbert, 1993). As such, it disrupts more traditional, hierarchical approaches to both teacher education and education research, and in so doing, aligns with the critical agenda of this dissertation study.
Cooperative practitioner inquiry. Not surprisingly, the growing interest in inquiry-based learning for students has been accompanied by a growing interest in
45 inquiry-based learning for teachers. One of the most fertile venues for exploring inquiry’s connection to teacher education lies within practitioner inquiry groups, in which in- service professionals explore questions related to their own classroom practices together in a community of peers (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009). And, while these groups can serve as important professional development opportunities that foster educational change, they are frequently conceptualized as part of education research (Darling-Hammond,
1996; Guskey, 2002; Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009).
As a genre within qualitative research, practitioner inquiry takes many forms.
When the inquiry is co-operative, it brings together people with similar interests and concerns to “(1) understand [their] world, make sense of [their] life and develop new and creative ways of looking at things; and (2) learn how to act to change things [they] may way to change and find out how to do things better” (Heron & Reason, 2001, p. 179).
This approach rejects traditional approaches to research that position researchers as uncontested experts of other people’s lives and that position people as passive subjects upon whom the research is performed. Instead, practitioner inquiry views the practitioner as an active knowledge builder who partakes in the co-operative inquiry as a co- researcher and a co-subject (Heron & Reason, 2001). This perspective applies whether the participants are students and teachers in a classroom, teachers and university researchers, university researchers and students, or any combination thereof. Because every participant’s involvement and every participant’s influence on the process are valued, inquiry groups have an equity agenda that helps democratize the research system through which knowledge is co-constructed. To that end, Heron (1996) described cooperative inquiry as an endeavor that is organized around three main ideas: (1)
46 cognitive and methodological empowerment, (2) political empowerment, and (3) emotional and interpersonal empowerment. Such inquiry thus creates a community of value whose very existence depends upon the upholding of egalitarian, humanist principles. Kinloch and San Pedro (2014) described this kind of inquiry as “Projects of
Humanization,” in which all research participants authentically listen to each other, construct ideas together, reveal their vulnerabilities to each other, and share their emotions as they inquire into educational issues.
In their examination of the relationship between inquiry and grand education research narratives (built upon a positivist methodological foundation), Hulburt and
Knotts (2012) noted that current U.S. education policy supports not just the standardization of knowledge of students, but also of teachers, and by extension, teacher researchers. Inquiry as a theoretical framework and a methodological approach provides a space within which practitioners can create counter-narratives about whose knowledge counts—a site of resistance against forces that homogenize perspectives and reduce practitioners to technicians who are to implement “best practices” dictated by privileged others (i.e., researchers, policymakers) who purport to “know” the most about teachers’ lives (Hulbert & Knotts 2012). In this sense, inquiry groups provide a context for teachers to not just explore questions about their practice, but also to discover and claim agency, disrupting from within a hegemonic knowledge system. This potential can be undermined, however, by institutionalized professional development disguised as authentic inquiry.
47 Inquiry groups versus conventional professional development. Sawyer (2004) argued that conventional conceptualizations of teaching fail to account for the generative and creative nature of high quality instruction. He explained, “Teaching has often been thought of as a creative performance. Although comparisons with performance were originally intended to emphasize teacher creativity, they have become associated instead with contemporary reform efforts toward scripted instruction that deny the creativity of teachers” (p. 12). On this point, Sawyer continued:
Scripted instruction is opposed to constructivist, inquiry-based, and dialogic teaching methods that emphasize classroom collaboration. To provide insight into these methods, the "teaching as performance" metaphor must be modified: Teaching is improvisational performance. Conceiving of teaching as improvisation highlights the collaborative and emergent nature of effective classroom practice, helps us to understand how curriculum materials relate to classroom practice, and shows why teaching is a creative art. (p. 12)
Sawyer’s argument also applies to traditional professional development versus teacher- driven inquiry models. The former are often controlled by school administrators and usually position teachers as passive recipients of “how-to” instruction on delivering standardized curricula. Such models further the teacher-as-technician phenomenon that has gained traction through the accountability movement of recent years, denying educators the respect they deserve as pedagogical experts and the autonomy they require to enact the improvisational performances of effective classroom practice. Inquiry groups, on the other hand, honor teachers as expert pedagogues, capable problem solvers, and skilled constructors of knowledge. Teacher inquiry as a professional development model is, therefore, consistent with a social justice oriented research agenda. In centralizing the professional knowledge of practitioners and disrupting top-down
48 professional development, an inquiry approach can support teachers in examining their positionality in relation to institutionalized systems. This criticality can lead to liberatory classroom environments shaped by relationships built on trust (Duncan-Andrade &
Morrell, 2008). Moreover, the mutually inflecting phenomena that inquiry engenders— self-awareness, criticality, interrogation of systematized knowledge—are all well-suited to endeavors that require collaboration across subject area boundaries, such as Project
ASPIRE’s ICDT.
Theories of Interdisciplinarity
The ICDT’s agenda was ultimately to inquire into the nature and purpose of teaching and learning that crosses disciplinary boundaries. Since the ICDT provides the context of my study, it is both logical and necessary that I position interdisciplinarity as the focus of my inquiry, as well as part of my conceptual framework. However, because research on interdisciplinarity is challenged by the lack of consensus on what exactly it is
(Boix Mansilla, 2006), I begin this review of relevant literature by first deconstructing the term. From there, I discuss different conceptualizations of interdisciplinarity, and then I examine arts integration as a specific approach to interdisciplinary teaching and learning.
An etymological perspective: The nature of disciplines. Ultimately, the term
“interdisciplinary” is comprised of two word parts: inter and disciplinary. The Latin prefix inter is relatively straightforward. It indicates a relationship between entities, with its most common synonyms including “between” and “among”. The second part of the term is more complicated, however. The term “discipline” is commonly used as an umbrella to cover subjects that share core features within an area of knowledge.
According to Foucault (1969/1992) this connotation originated in a Western, 49 Enlightenment Era impulse to categorize and systematize information according to positivist, scientific models. The effort to organize knowledge into “neutral” taxonomies through which one could make sense of everything in the world, was quickly institutionalized. Ultimately, it spread from Europe to the United States where in the late
19th and early 20th centuries, universities and colleges organized education into approximately 20 disciplines. Each discipline had its own department, major, and prescribed courses (Peters, 1999; Klein, 2005).
As a result of this history, many definitions of the concept “discipline” tend to place emphasis on the topical information contained within a given field of study. For instance, the discipline of mathematics includes the subjects of algebra, geometry, calculus, etc., and the topics within those subjects are united in their focus on the use numbers as a symbolic system that quantifies measurable phenomena. That symbolic system functions as the “language” of the discipline of mathematics. The definition of
“discipline” used in this study, however, reflects a socio-cultural perspective by recognizing that language does not operate in isolation. Its employment requires a host of disciplinary understandings, including discipline-specific rules, conventions and tacit knowledge (Peters, 1999; Klein, 2005). Every discipline is characterized by specific ways of talking that are unique to it and reflect the knowledge and practices it engenders
(Billman & Pearson, 2013; Herne, 2006). In this way, a discipline is akin to a culture which includes an epistemological “field” whose characteristics are shaped by time, space, and place and which, in turn, determine the qualities of the knowledge that are formed within it (Foucault, 1970/1994; Gee, 1992). Foucault later referred to this idea as an “episteme”, or the unconscious structures out of which domain-specific knowledge is
50 generated (Foucault 1970/1994). In the realm of STEM, Grimberg and Gummer (2013) described the discipline of science as a “practice-knowledge cycle”, framing the discipline more as a socio-cultural practice, much in the way literacy has been framed by
New Literacy Studies scholars (see, e.g., Gee ,1992; Street, 1995; Scollon & Scollon,
1981). By extension, the culture of education within any discipline can also be understood as a practice-knowledge cycle.
Since Kuhn (1962) described what later became known as the “paradigm wars” between qualitative and quantitative research in his seminal work, The Structure of
Scientific Revolutions, scholars concerned with the nature of knowledge have increasingly interrogated what exactly is contained within a paradigm, and by extension, within disciplinary boundaries (Szyjka, 2012). Kuhn’s own definition of “paradigm” implicitly conceptualized the term as a “discipline”, since he described it in relation to a defining set of practices within science at any given time in history (Kuhn, 1962). Others have looked beyond practices, to incorporate the ways in which practices are determined, implemented and, as Kuhn pointed out, how practices change over time (See, e.g.,
Joubish, Khurram, Fatima & Haider, 2011). Writing from the perspective of an English language educator, Scotland (2012) described a paradigm as a broad category that consists of a specific and interrelated ontology, epistemology, and set of methods that determine the way inhabitants of the paradigm perceive and understand the world.
Another dimension of the interdisciplinary debate involves the relationship between paradigms and culture—something often addressed only indirectly in the literature. For example, Joubish et al. (2011) argued that a “world view” is an essential feature of a paradigm and has certain cultural components. Muresan and Flueres (2009)
51 grappled with the relevance of culture to paradigmatic identity when they described paradigm as “a unitary ensemble, defined by a sum of distinct and coherent features that characterize it; therefore, its specification emerges from it” (p. 207). Recognizing the multi-layered and interrelated aspects of these self-defining metaphysical entities, they accounted for paradigm shifts by describing cultural paradigms as mutually inflecting with education paradigms, so that when one paradigm’s specificities change, the others move accordingly (Muresan & Flueres, 2009). In other words, paradigmatic transformation is part of a recursive cycle that originates at the intersection of the two paradigms in question (cultural and education).
This study’s theoretical framework takes its cue from the idea that an authentic shift in one paradigm necessitates an authentic shift in the other. Muresan and Flueres
(2009) noted that without intersecting with another paradigm, a single paradigm’s recursivity undermines multiculturalism and innovation, because it remains a closed system. Closed systems do not have the opportunity to encounter new inputs. Therefore, any growth within them is limited to a finite set of possibilities, which is generated by the mutual inflection of their components. However, when paradigms intersect, heterogeneity inherently increases, with one paradigm providing new inputs that can catalyze previously unavailable change in the other (Muresan & Flueres, 2009).
Conceptualizing STEM as a discipline. The concept of STEM as a discipline might, at first glance, seem antithetical to the name “STEM”, an acronym for four distinct subject areas: Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. In categorizing them as a single domain, I do not in any way mean to imply that there are no differences among them or that they do not exist as discreet disciplines in other contexts. However, when
52 they are considered in the context of the STEM movement, they are largely conceptualized as an autonomous discipline. Klein (2005) pointed out that the very creation of a new name (STEM) is evidence that a new and distinct discipline exists. That discipline contains some knowledges and excludes others. She explained that any nomenclature “acts as a terministic screen that filters, directs, and redirects attention along some paths rather than others. Terminology is not only a reflection of reality. It is also a selection and a deflection” (Klein, 2005, p. 55). Foucault emphasized the importance of looking beyond the names given to disciplines in order to recognize the ideological forces that determine what gets attached to those names and what doesn’t. In The Archaeology of
Knowledge, he explained that “these divisions—whether our own, or those contemporary with the discourse under examination—are always themselves reflexive categories, principles of classification, normative rules, institutionalized types . . .” (Foucault,
1969/1992, p. 23).
Recent scholarship demonstrates that STEM has already become an institutionalized reflexive category, both within itself and beyond. For instance, Janice
Morrison (2006), President and CEO of the Teaching Institute for Excellence in STEM
(TIES) described STEM as a meta-discipline, a grouping made out of its parts and formed into a new whole. Not wishing to be left out of the STEM conversation (or pool of funding) the American Psychological Association recently published a treatise declaring that psychology “should consistently qualify as a STEM discipline” (Bray,
2010, p. 7). The assumption underlying this argument is that STEM is already a discipline made of sub-disciplines. The treatise argues that psychology has been denied entry to the discipline, which, by implication, means STEM as we currently know it is
53 actually missing one of the pieces of its whole (Bray, 2010). And, arguments for STEM becoming STEAM conceptualize STEM as one discipline and art as the other. Providing an example aligned with Foucault’s description of how ideology-based disciplinary boundaries are formed and located within historically bound systems of knowledge,
McMullen and Winkler (2012) cited the Age of Reason as the genesis of modern disciplines. Favoring a pre-Enlightenment configuration, the authors argued for interdisciplinary collaboration between two disciplines: STEM and the arts. This stance was based on the presumption that there were two—not five—different disciplines in the equation (McMullen & Winkler, 2012). In fact, Peters-Burton (2014) has recently argued for an articulation of the “Nature of STEM” which is based on the shared characteristics of the four component disciplines. She explained,
[w]e can describe NOSTEM [Nature of STEM] as characterized by the human endeavor orf anticipating outcomes based on background knowledge, making sense of what is observed, tbe use of logical reasoning, approaching unknowns systematically, and the necessity of transparency for the purposes of replicability and evaluation. (p.100)
In this, she reinforced Sanders’ (2009) perspective that failure to consider STEM as an integrated whole was nothing more than “the status quo educational practices that have monopolized the landscape for a century” (p. 21). In this dissertation study, therefore, when I refer to STEM, I conceptualize it as an integrative whole comprised of disciplines that have critical features in common. Those commonalities—such as their shared epistemological and ontological orientations—become particularly evident and relevant when juxtaposed with non-STEM fields, such as art, in the context of STEM-nonSTEM interdisciplinary endeavors.
54 The construction of interdisciplinary. Despite widespread interest in furthering interdisciplinary endeavors, there is currently no general consensus on any consistent definition of interdisciplinarity (or what it means to unite two or more disciplines). Boix
Mansilla (2006) suggested that this lack of consensus is attributed to a general lack of empirical research on interdisciplinarity’s elements, qualities, and methods. However, she and her colleagues at the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Project Zero have provided seminal and rigorous research on the nature of interdisciplinary work (See, e.g.,
Dillon, 2001; Boix Mansilla & Gardner, 2008; Boix Mansilla, 2008/09). This dissertation study, therefore, relies on Boix Mansilla’s (2009) definition of interdisciplinarity as, “a process by which individuals and groups integrate insights and modes of thinking from two or more disciplines or established fields, to advance their fundamental or practical understanding of a subject that stands beyond the scope of a single discipline” (p. 3). In addition, to evaluate the success of interdisciplinary endeavors, I use a Project Zero framework that defines interdisciplinarity understanding as: (1) purposeful, (2) disciplined, and (3) integrated (Boix Mansilla, 2006). According to these guidelines, not only must the learning be authentically grounded in the disciplines at hand, but those disciplines must also be brought together and synthesized in some meaningful way. (This is consistent with Peters-Burton’s [2014] proposed conceptualization of the Nature of
STEM and Sanders’ [2009] definition of integrative STEM education.) As the Project
Zero framework states, “[d]isciplinary perspectives are not merely juxtaposed. Rather elements of different disciplines are put into productive relationship with one another, allowing students to accomplish something cognitively that they might not with the tools of only one discipline” (Project Zero, 2006, p. 2).
55 Boix Mansilla and Gardner (2008) also argued that a discipline is bound up in a distinct cultural, epistemic and ontological stance. A mind that is “disciplined”, therefore, does more than take in and file away facts to be recalled and recited on cue. Rather, it understands the purpose of disciplinary expertise and constructs and communicates an essential knowledge base using methods specific to the discipline (Boix Mansilla &
Gardner, 2008). Mastery of these dimensions in any given discipline, combined with purposeful integration of two or more disciplines, helps avoid what can often become an overemphasis on disciplinary specialization. By recognizing the scenarios in which it is preferable to move beyond one’s customary discipline-bound realm, interdisciplinary thinkers integrate understandings and ways of thinking from their own and additional domains (Ulbricht, 1998). This approach can be understood as an informed eclecticism in which disciplinary insights are deliberately brought together to create something new
(Boix Mansilla, 2006). The idea to emphasize here is that the insights are together. As the term “integrated” specifies, it is not enough for the disciplines at hand to simply run alongside or in proximity to one another. Rather, there must be an encounter between them—an area in which they become fully fused such that a theme, topic, or problem can be explored in an entirely new way that would not have otherwise existed. As a result, the fusion generates knowledge unavailable by any other means. The point at which disciplines meet and this fusion takes place is what Boix Mansilla (2006) described as a
“fertile intersection” (p. 2)
It is rare that a complex interdisciplinary endeavor can be executed alone in secondary and higher education, because of the unlikelihood that a single individual can master advanced disciplinary knowledge in more than one discipline (Hackett & Rhoten,
56 2009; Sanders, 2009). And, not only is the development expertise in multiple domains difficult from a cognitive standpoint, our current discipline-centric institutional frameworks that dictate how knowledges are organized and students are educated stack the cards against interdisciplinarity (Peters, 1999; Sanders, 2009). The challenge is heightened the farther apart the disciplines are located in terms of epistemological orientation (e.g., mathematics vs. art). (This also stacks the cards against the arts having a co-equal status with STEM in the current standards-driven realities that characterize the accountability movement in education.) Therefore, just as complex world problems can seldom be solved by a single discipline alone, finding and leveraging productive intersections at advanced levels and/or between distal disciplinary epistemological orientations is rarely a solitary endeavor.
Arts integration. Like interdisciplinarity, “arts integration” is a term used frequently in education with various implicit and explicit definitions and little overall consensus (Deasy, 2003; Parsons, 2004; Burnaford, Brown, Doherty & McLaughlin,
2007). A relatively young field of study, interdisciplinarity in relation to the arts can be traced clearly to the Progressive Era, particularly to the writings of John Dewey (1934) who argued that art and aesthetic experience originate in everyday life experiences and that everyday experiences are the foundations of learning. These ideas were embraced and revived by a number of scholars interested in holistic approaches to schooling in the
1960s and 70s, most notably by Eliot Eisner (e.g., 1966, 1972, 1976). Eisner (2002) argued against the marginalization of the arts in education, disrupting prevailing notions that art, with its emphasis on the expressive and the personal, was somehow disconnected from the intellect. On this basis, he paved a path for several generations (including the
57 current one) of arts advocates who have promoted models of arts-integration that both value the affective and frame the arts as serious cognitive activity (See, e.g., Bresler,
1995; Powell & Speiser, 2005; Marshall, 2014).
Bresler (1995) categorized some of the most frequent ways educators in recent decades have described arts integration. (NB: her list includes two separate definitions for interdisciplinarity.) The following is her complete compilation:
• Infusion: integrating a particular subject across the curriculum; • Topics-within-disciplines: integrating multiple strands of the same discipline within the instructional setting; • Thematic approaches: subordinating subject matter to a theme, allowing the boundaries between disciplines to blur; • Holistic approaches: addressing the needs of the whole child, including cognitive, physical, moral, affective, and spiritual dimensions; • Multidisciplinary: looking at a situation as it is portrayed in different disciplines; • Interdisciplinary: considering a problem in terms of different disciplines and then synthesizing these perspectives in coming up with a more general account; • Metadisciplinary--comparing the practices within a particular discipline; • Transdisciplinary--examining a concept as it appears in political and physical discourse (Bresler, 1995, p. 31).
Bresler (1995) further distinguished between two major approaches to integration, with one focusing on themes (to help students develop higher-order content knowledge) and the other focusing on procedures (to help students acquire general skills applicable in a range of contexts). From these categories, she created four overarching groups or
“styles” that encompass the vast majority of arts integration efforts. Those four groups are: (1) the subservient (most commonly found; used to spice up other subjects), (2) the co-equal, cognitive integrative (most advocated by scholars; least commonly occurring),
(3) the affective (used to alter students moods or reward/validate their self-expression), and (4) the social integrative (most often embraced by administrators seeking to establish and promote school community through public displays/performances) (Bresler, 1995). 58 However, while Bresler (1995) categorized interdisciplinarity as a form of arts integration, this study does the opposite. It positions art integration as a form of interdisciplinarity in which students construct and demonstrate understanding through an art form, engaging in a creative process that connects to the content while meeting evolving objectives in all of the disciplines at hand (Silverstein & Layne, 2010; Marshall,
2014). Further, it differentiates between more facile attempts to incorporate the arts into other content areas (through simple illustration, for example) and what Marshall (2006) deemed “substantive arts integration.” She argued, “integration comes in many forms, ranging from the most superficial (illustrating content from other domains) to deeper explorations (examining concepts that domains have in common)” (p. 19). She continued:
True integration is a substantive approach that explores and explicates connections between areas on a conceptual and structural level (Clark, 1997). In art, this means exploring fundamental commonalities and differences between art and other areas (especially how ideas are researched, conceptualized and communicated) and making them explicit through art practice. (Marshall 2006, p. 19)
This definition provides useful guidelines in the planning, formative, and summative stages of arts integrated efforts and in the evaluation of participants’ understandings of integrative work. Such guidance is particularly important in the STEM-Art context, because the disciplines’ respective forms of knowledge and ways of knowing (i.e., predominantly positivistic versus primarily subjectivist/interpretivist) do not necessarily integrate easily. Weismann et al. (2008) pointed out that the result of endeavors that are constructed within the ambiguity characterizing interdisciplinary work can be “largely superficial or driven by power-constellations representing underlying [disciplinary] values” (p. 15). To overcome such obstacles, arts integration must emphasize reflexivity
59 and the “methodological, conceptual and theoretical skills that enable the exploration of boundaries and connections between disciplines” (Weismann et al., 2008, p. 11). This perspective aligns with Marshall’s (2005) definition, which emphasizes both conceptual connections between disciplines and with the quality of reflexivity recommended by
Weismann et al. (2008). Marshall (2005) argued, “substantive curriculum integration requires educators to understand how the mind perceives, learns and conceptualizes through analogical thinking, metaphor and schema-construction” (p. 231).
STEM-Art integration. By focusing on the union of STEM and art, this study focuses on one particular subset of arts integration, which has increasingly come to be identified as “STEAM” (see also Chapter 1). Much of the literature in this area centers on arts advocacy, tends toward the descriptive, and/or is found in practitioner-oriented
“how-to” articles (Wynn & Harris, 2002; McCubbins, Thomas & Vetere, 2014; Root-
Bernstein & Root-Bernstein, 2013). In addition, art education’s most significant academic conference, hosted annually by the National Art Education Association, has consistently offered a number of sessions on STEM-art integration, most of which are also of the descriptive and/or how-to variety
(http://www.arteducators.org/news/resources-from-past-conventions). Marshall (2014) is one notable exception to this trend, having recently theorized art integration as belonging within a transdisciplinary domain. Transdisciplinarity, she claimed, goes deeper than common conceptualizations of arts integration, which fail to make conceptual connections that actually fuse the disciplines. Drawing on Klein (2000) and using a framework based on Systems Theory and the New Sciences (i.e., Next Generation
Science Standards, 2013), Marshall (2014) argued that deep integration is the hallmark of
60 transdisciplinarity, whereby component disciplines are acknowledged, the wisdom of each discipline is recognized, and the disciplines are contextualized in relation to each other and the topic under study.
Following Piaget (1971) who first introduced the term “transdisciplinarity,”
Nicolescu (1994) drafted a “Charter of Transdisciplinarity” in which he explained that
“the keystone of Transdisciplinarity is the semantic and practical unification of the meanings that traverse and lie beyond different disciplines” (p. 148). While Nicolescu clearly articulated transdisciplinarity’s commitment to equity throughout the manifesto, transdisciplinarity’s emphasis on disciplinary boundary dissolution has become fashionable, particularly in Problem- and Project-Based Learning and in the domains of science and public policy (Carew & Wickson, 2010). Such conceptualizations of disciplinary interaction, while not without merit, present a more assimilationist perspective than the framework for interdisciplinary understanding (Boix Mansilla, 2006) that I use in this dissertation study. This framework allows me to avoid the “melting pot” pitfalls of theoretical and applied transdisciplinarity, which can result in the creation of super- or hyper-disciplines under which individual disciplines (and those whose identities are attached to them) are subsumed (Lichnerowicz, 1972; Weismann et al., 2008).
Therefore, while aligned in principle with Marshall’s (2014) thoughtful description of
STEM-Art integration as a transdisciplinary endeavor, the critical agenda of this dissertation study leads me to reject the assimilationist impulses of the contemporary transdisciplinary movement in favor of Boix Mansilla’s (2006) interdisciplinary framework, which aligns more closely with the tenets of multiculturalism.
61 Arts integration as a multicultural endeavor. Banks (1995) specified that multicultural education has five tenets: (1) integrating content related to the lives of marginalized people whose histories have been systemically erased from the officially sanctioned curriculum; (2) helping students discern and interrogate the cultural assumptions and frame of reference that are embedded in how knowledge becomes organized and codified; (3) modifying one’s teaching practices to enact pedagogies that meet the needs of all learners from all socio-cultural backgrounds; (4) actively working to reduce prejudice in the classroom; and (5) creating classroom and school cultures that equally empower all cultural group members. These five tenets are consistent with the notion of interdisciplinarity as simultaneously disciplined (i.e., equally empowering the disciplines in question), yet integrated (i.e., integrating multiple perspectives to leverage, rather than deny or exploit, the power of difference). Using this perspective, I define arts integration as multicultural and intercultural endeavor, whereby participants strategically engage the features of the art and STEM disciplines, across and with their differences
(including differences of power, status and privilege), in authentically collaborative efforts.
As part of this study’s critical commitment, it is imperative to consider how power and its dimensions inform interdisciplinary Communities of Practice. In the context of STEM-Art integration, I am not suggesting that disciplinary inequities are tantamount to the other, more well-known and much more dire injustices that individuals and groups of individuals experience (e.g., inequity based on race, class, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, religion, disability, etc.) That said, a commitment to social justice means a commitment to perceiving power in all its forms. It also means calling out and
62 disrupting inequity wherever it exists. Only then can authentic participation by all members of a community of practice—including a STEM-Art one—be realized.
It is common for arts advocates to decry the pervasive bias that privileges
“academic” subjects, especially STEM, over the arts in schooling. (For example, science and mathematics are required subjects on which students receive instruction every day, whereas art is often offered only once a week, and sometimes not at all.) The bias for
STEM is felt in numerous ways, most notably through the now common fiscal practice of eliminating the arts and other subjects viewed as non-essential to students’ education.
The economic disparity between funding for STEM versus the arts is visually represented in Figure 2. In this image, the STEM domain refers to the funding received by the
National Science Foundation (the U. S. government association most associated with science research), and the art domain refers to the total of equivalent organizations for the arts (http://sites.jmu.edu/jmuse/2011/11/10/funding-arts-sciences/).
Figure 2. 2010 NSF funding relative to funding for U.S. arts organizations (National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities)
63 In addition to the dollars, inequities between the STEM and art disciplines take multiple forms, and the imbalance in power is not unidirectional. While economically and institutionally STEM dominates art, the science and mathematics teacher participants in this study were typical in their feelings of incompetence and insecurity related to visual art, often expressing their initial fear and intimidation. Bourdieu (1991) pointed out that
“capital” is not just an economic concept but a socio-cultural one as well (Bourdieu,
1973). “Cultural capital” refers to the knowledge, skills and advantages (such as education) associated with different levels of social status (Bourdieu, 1973). In the visual arts, higher social status is associated not only with the economic resources required to engage with art as a commodity, but also with fluency in Western Eurocentric art discourse. Therefore, because STEM and art exist in a complicated and unequal set of power relationships, I conceptualize its interdisciplinary STEM-Art Community of
Practice as a “contact zone”. Pratt defined the contact zone as “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today” (Pratt, 1991, p. 33). While Pratt used the term “contact zone” in reference to the effects of power imbalances that are much more serious than the disciplinary imbalances existing within an interdisciplinary terrain, the idea is nonetheless relevant. Namely, if disciplines are understood as socially constructed
Communities of Practice, the idea of the contact zone provides an effective vehicle for problematizing the ways in which non-positivistic knowledge systems are often dominated and appropriated to meet the needs of the Western rationalist tradition. This brings to the fore not only the question of whose knowledge and ways of knowing are
64 legitimated, it also exposes another dimension of the systemic gatekeeping that serves the needs of an education system increasingly aligned with free-market capitalism.
Theoretical Intersections
Design Interdisciplinarity Inquiry Inquiry
Apprentice- Collaboration ship
Communities of Practice
Figure 3. Theoretical model showing areas of intersection
In order to better understand how the three primary theoretical perspectives
(Communities of Practice, inquiry, and interdisciplinarity) operate, it is important to investigate points of intersection among them. While there could be multiple approaches to examining these intersections, the ultimate goal of this chapter is to build the foundations for understanding what lies at the heart of the study’s overarching framework.
Figure 3, therefore, identifies the additional perspectives I use to synthesize the three primary theories. Each of these additional perspectives (collaboration, apprenticeship and design inquiry) operates in distinctive ways within the framework, which leads me to
65 explain them individually, yet in relation to how they unite the primary theories that ground the conceptual framework. In contrast to the linearity that logic-based writing suggests, the relationships between all of these theoretical areas are neither sequential nor confined to those I have illustrated in my conceptual framework. In fact, these theories are all interrelated. Therefore, I have brought them together in what may appear to be a complex Venn diagram. The diagram’s boundaries are intended to be permeable, indicating the continuous oscillations involved in socially constructed theoretical perspectives and experimental cultures characterized by creative recombination, such as that of the Project ASPIRE ICDT.
Collaboration. Throughout this dissertation study, I use the terms “collaboration” and “collaborative”, along with the related terms “collective” and “collectively” to indicate any effort of individuals working in community toward a shared vision, in ways that honor all individuals’ authentic participation. An unwavering and reflexive commitment to authentic collaboration can avoid what Anderson (1998) characterized as the proliferation of “bogus, superficial or ineffective” discourses of “participation” that masquerade as democratic exercises (p. 571). Time is one critical dimension of developing authentic collaboration. Frey, Lohmeier, Lee and Tollefson (2006) highlighted that collaboration is not a one-time, static event but rather an ongoing, recursive process that unfolds over time. Theirs is a temporally bound theory of behavior coalescing various other theoretical models into a stage-based format: (1) coexistence (2) communication (3) cooperation (4) coordination (5) coalition (6) collaboration, and (7) coadunation (Frey et al., 2006).
66 Numerous studies have found that authenticity and collaboration are necessary conditions for learning, including in teacher education (See, e.g., Choi & Hannafin, 1995;
Zheng, 2010). Describing lecture-hall learning as inauthentic, Zheng (2010) defined authenticity as a combination of knowledge and practice. This allowed him to explain the frequent failure of traditional teacher education programs to unite school learning with real-world applications. Herrington and Oliver (1999) expanded the contextual dimensions of collaborative learning when they found that higher order thinking within interactive multimedia group work occurred when authentic activities, multiple perspectives, expert performance, scaffolding, opportunities for collaboration, reflection and authentic assessment were all present. They also found that the nature of social interaction within the learning context was related to the kind of thinking that participants engaged in (as evidenced through their talk). Collaboration, in particular, was foregrounded by these scholars who concluded that individuals who had previously worked together and who were socially at ease with their group members, displayed evidence of higher order thinking (Herrington & Oliver, 1999).
The notion of collaboration has particular implications for those concerned with issues of individual difference within inquiry-driven Communities of Practice.
Collaboration within such groups depends upon participants’ access to the practices that characterize and inform the community. Zheng (2010) found that in order for all students—not just those with access to the normative practices—to collaborate and, therefore, succeed in a learning community, educators must recognize the value of different perspectives, assessments, and performances of understanding. These differences include those based on disciplinary orientations. Gee (2004) argued that each discipline is
67 its own Community of Practice with its own hegemonically determined set of specialist language and symbol systems that are “complex, technical, and initially alienating to many learners” (p. 3). From a situated learning perspective, one cannot collaborate, develop expertise, and, therefore, participate in interdisciplinary inquiry processes without access to the community’s multiple language and symbol systems.
Matheison (2012) pointed out that scholarly examinations of context-related differences within disciplines have focused predominantly on disciplinary epistemologies.
Her study, however, proposed a socio-cultural framework for exploring difference between and within disciplinary workgroups in higher education. Using the framework, she found that educators can have a significant role as change agents in the teaching, learning, and assessment cultures of their disciplines. The implications of Matheison’s
(2012) findings are significant for nascent interdisciplinary Communities of Practice that unite participants with differing cultural (disciplinary) practices. As mediators of disciplinary epistemologies and contextual factors, educators have the power to reshape their own disciplinary cultures to become more diverse and inclusive. However,
Matheison’s (2012) study also exposed a barrier to the actualization of this potential.
Despite general interest in making the learning community’s culture responsive to the needs of disadvantaged students, study participants perceived threats to disciplinary integrity and the quality of teaching and learning when changes were imposed structurally or perceived as ethnic patronage (Matheison, 2012).
Design-Inquiry. In recent years, much attention has been given to the concept of “design thinking” and its value in education and educational research.
(See, e.g., DiSessa, Confrey, Schauble, Cobb & Lehrer, 2003; Barab & Squire, 2004;
68 Gorard, Roberts & Taylor, 2004; Mor & Winters, 2007.) Emerging from an industrial and product design studio context and making its way into the world of business, the concept has been defined as a human-centered approach to solving multifaceted problems. That approach uses the designer’s sensibility and methods (such as brainstorming, prototyping and analogizing) to address a wide range of problems
(Brown, 2008; Green & Bonollo, 2003). Buchanan (1992) suggested that the approach was particularly effective in solving “wicked” problems (i.e., those that are ill-defined, with the problem and the solution both being unclear at the outset of the design process). The approach has proven useful in relation to collaborative inquiry- based learning, as multiple studies in the realm of technology education have proven. (See, e.g., Leinonen & Durall, 2014; Mor & Mogilevsky, 2013; and Kali,
2006.)
With its inherent connection to practice, design-inquiry posits that people learn through collective, exploration-based problem solving. Conole, Scanlon, Littleton,
Kerawalla and Mulholland (2010) specified that design-inquiry is a “messy, creative and iterative approach” (p. 289), requiring the active involvement of all collaborators throughout the entire design process. In the context of designing technology, they found that design workshops in which learning was mediated by what they called “artifacts”
(broadly conceptualized to signify multiple forms of representation such as instruments, signs, languages and machines), led to the growth of shared understandings among interdisciplinary participants. And, using a critical perspective that recognized the existence of power dynamics in such endeavors, they argued that successful design
69 inquiry endeavors require careful management and orchestration of differing perspectives
(Conole et al., 2010).
In another study related to technology education, Mor and Mogilevsky’s (2013)
Learning Design Studio (LDS) framework was a design-inquiry model advanced as an alternative to traditional, top-down professional models. LDS is a collaborative, blended, project-based process for “the enculturation of educational professionals into design inquiry of learning” (Mor & Mogilevsky, 2013, p. 1). The model rejected more traditional approaches to professional development, which tend to discuss theories in the abstract and then ask teachers to somehow bridge those theories to practice. Instead, ideas were explored in relation to instructional dilemmas that were personally meaningful to participants (Mor & Mogilevsky, 2013). Teachers thus engaged in inquiry-driven learning that aligned with design thinking. In other words, the professional development was iterative in nature and structured around question-asking, investigation, observation, data collection and analysis, modeling, concluding and synthesizing through discussions with peers (Anastopoulou, Sharples, Ainsworth, Crook, O’Malley & Wright, 2012; Mor
& Mogilvesky, 2013). Using a collaborative, exploration and studio-based instructional format thus positions teachers as creative beings who continually theorize their work through the design of solutions to problems they care about and in so doing, reflect upon their own growth. As a result, teachers become change agents whose learning is actualized through the design of pedagogical innovations with broader impact. Mor and
Mogilvesky (2013) thus demonstrated that knowledge construction and reflection interface with collaboration in a powerful combination that drives effective teacher learning. They futher explained that research focused on this kind of design-inquiry
70 includes gathering and analyzing evidence of the design process itself (Craft & Mor,
2012).
Curriculum design-inquiry. Davis and Krajcik (2005) argued that facilitating teacher learning is often even more complex than facilitating student learning. This, they claimed, is because teacher learning is situated in daily practice and is mediated by both individuals and curricular materials. To account for this complexity, they situate curricula as a site of agency whereby teachers can adapt their instruction of the curricula to meet the needs of each classroom situation. However, they stop short of recognizing the full power of curriculum-related inquiry. Instead, they advanced a professional development framework in which curriculum developers are separate from teachers, arguing that “a teacher’s pedagogical design capacity describes the teacher’s ability to draw on the resources at hand (i.e., the curriculum designed by the developer) to make productive changes to curriculum materials” (p. 9).
In contrast, viewing teachers as designers instead of implementers of curriculum lies at the heart of this study of teacher learning. Such design practice is comprised of several stages, including analysis, creation, implementation, and evaluation (Gustafson &
Branch, 1997). Voogt et al. (2011) found that this kind of curriculum design process, when undertaken by teachers in collaboration with their peers, can lead to increases in teacher job satisfaction and self-confidence in addition to changes in their beliefs and practices. Similar findings exist in pre-service teacher education where Fuhrmann, Kali and Hoadley (2008) determined that the collaborative curriculum design process led to an increase in student knowledge about both content and how people learn.
71 Participating in interdisciplinarity: Apprenticeship theory. In order to explore the relevance of apprenticeship theory to this study, it is important to understand the broader term “participation”. For this, I rely on Anderson (1998) who argued that participation is authentic if it “includes relevant stakeholders and creates relatively safe, structured spaces for multiple voices to be heard” (p. 575). Attending to authentic participation is inherent in studies that adopt a critical stance, and it is particularly vital in research that impacts disenfranchised and disempowered communities (Kelly, Mock &
Tandon, 2001; Brydon-Miller, 2001).
Questions of participation related to Communities of Practice have primarily addressed the ways in which newcomers enter and eventually actualize full membership within an established community, under the tutelage of old-timers who are experts in its activities, values, perspectives, norms, power relations and discourses. This construct is an outgrowth of Vygotsky’s (1978, 1987) notion of the more skilled other, which Lave and
Wenger (1991) expanded when they theorized that the movement of a newcomer to old- timer status is a process of acclimation, acculturation, and development that unfolds gradually over time. The progression begins on the margins of the Community of Practice, where the newcomers engage in important, yet relatively minor, tasks in a manner constituting “legitimate peripheral participation” (Lave & Wenger, 1991). As time passes and they gain experience through mentorship by the experts, newcomers lose their novice identity and eventually develop their own expertise in the group’s defining practices.
While it is easy to image a direct-line trajectory that begins at the margins of membership and ends at the center, Lave and Wenger (1991) rejected this idea. Instead, they argued that participation is inherently multi-faceted, multi-layered and complex, with membership
72 involving “multiple, varied, and more-or less-engaged and inclusive ways of being located in the fields of participation defined by a community” (Lave & Wenger, 1991, p. 36).
The idea that community insiders mentor newcomers implies that insiders possess greater cultural capital than do outsiders and newcomers. Therefore, the tutelage of novices by experts can be considered a vehicle for socialization whereby newcomers
“’appropriate’ the existing [cultural] values and strategies of others, ultimately reproducing an existing cognitive and social order” (Wertsch, del Rio & Alvarez, 1995).
Numerous scholars have recognized the power dynamics inherent in this process, arguing that entry into a Community of Practice can present difficulties when new practices force novices to reconsider and, potentially view as illegitimate, the practices of other communities to which they belong (Reay, 2009; Bamber & Tett, 2000; O’Donnell &
Tobbell, 2007). As individuals encounter discordances between their multiple
Communities of Practice, the nature and shape of their participation in each is inevitably affected, particularly during the mediated transition from community outsider to insider
(O’Donnell & Tobbell, 2007). When novices feel compelled to conform to the dominant norms, values and expectations of the new Community of Practice, they may consciously, subconsciously, overtly, and/or covertly exclude dimensions of their knowledge or identities that would be deemed illegitimate within their new Community of Practice
(Thompson, 2005).
Power differences within Communities of Practice—specifically as it concerns the transition from outsider to insider through the guidance of experts—have been deliberately embedded into highly stratified, formalized approaches to education for centuries. The most well-known of these takes the form of an “apprenticeship”, a process
73 traditionally associated with vocational and craft-based learning. Lave and Wenger
(1991) used such apprenticeship as a model to explain the situatedness of learning, thereby laying the foundations for apprenticeship as a theory of cognition and metacognition, and not simply a method for acquiring trade-based psychomotor skills
(See, e.g., Dennen & Bruner, 2008; Dennen, 2004; Street, 2004; Rogoff, 1990, 1991).
This idea was later developed into a specific theory of “cognitive apprenticeship”
(Collins, Brown, & Newman, 1989).
Rogoff (1991) argued that though increasingly challenging, repeated and varied experiences supported by experts, novices “become skilled practitioners in the specific cognitive activities of their communities” (p. 351). However, she specified that the apprenticeship process is more than just a simple expert-novice binary. Rather, it is a system of culturally mitigated interpersonal involvements specific to the context in which activities take place. Research centered on apprenticeship, therefore, must consider structural components of culture, such as institutional values and resources (Rogoff,
1995). Rogoff’s definition of the term, apprenticeship, is worth quoting in its entirety:
The metaphor of apprenticeship provides a model in the plane of community activity, involving active individuals participating with others in culturally organized activity that has as part of its purpose the development of mature participation in the activity by the less experienced people. This metaphor extends the idea of craft apprenticeship to include participation in any other culturally organized activity, such as other kinds of work, schooling, and family relations. The idea of apprenticeship necessarily focuses attention on the specific nature of the activity involved, as well as on its relation to practices and institutions of the community in which it occurs - economic, political, spiritual, and material. (Rogoff, 1995, p. 142)
Elsewhere, Rogoff (1990) conceptualized the socio-cultural development of
74 expertise as a process that takes place on three planes: (1) the community, (2) the interpersonal and (3) the personal. She described the activities corresponding to each of those planes as: (1) apprenticeship, (2) guided participation and (3) participatory appropriation. The three planes and their attendant processes were intertwined and inseparable, thereby constituting essential parts of a complete whole. She explained that apprenticeship understood in relation to the community plane focuses attention on “the specific nature of the activity involved, as well as on its relation to practices and institutions of the community in which it occurs—economic, political, spiritual, and material” (Rogoff, 1995, p. 141). Guided participation referred to “the processes and systems of involvement between people as they communicate and coordinate efforts while participating in culturally valued activity” (Rogoff, 1995, p. 141). And, apropos identify formation, participatory appropriation referred to “the individual change process that happens through a sociocultural activity” (Rogoff, 1995, p.141). Drawing on Bakhtin
(1937/1981), she went so far as to specify that the change is a “becoming” (Rogoff, 1995,
141). The plane that has the most relevance to this dissertation study is that of community, and, therefore, I use apprenticeship theory to consider how members of differing disciplinary communities might come to form an interdisciplinary Community of Practice. However, in addition to foregrounding apprenticeship, I use all three planes in my data analysis in order to more fully understand the whole of the ICDT as a sociocultural activity. (See Chapter 3.)
Focusing on apprenticeship has particular relevance to teacher education, a realm in which the concept has been increasing used to support new models for inducting pre- service teachers into the practice under the guidance of in-service mentors. An important,
75 research-based outgrowth of these models has been the finding that apprenticeship is not a one-way street. Rather, research suggests that mentor teachers are also transformed through their interactions with their pre-service mentees (See, e.g., Jones, Rua & Carter,
1998; Ash & Levitt, 2003; Russell & Russell, 2011; Brosnan, Jaede & Stroot, 2014).
And, not only is learning multi-directional within the apprenticeship framework, an openness to the reciprocal nature of apprenticeship learning leads to more effective learning experiences generally (Achinstein & Villar, 2002). The multi-directional construct of apprenticeship theory is an essential perspective for understanding how, in an interdisciplinary Community of Practice, participants can guide each other in constructing understanding of the content, language, culture, methodologies, epistemologies and ontologies of their specific disciplines.
Conclusion
This chapter has provided an overview of the main theories—and their intersections—that are pertinent to this dissertation study. Like interdisciplinary work generally, the theoretical underpinnings of the study are complex and multifaceted. As such, these underpinnings are essential to understanding the success of the ICDT’s authentic and substantive STEM-Art collaborations. At the same time, a close examination of the theoretical groundwork I have laid out raises the question of what exactly lies at the center of the conceptual framework I presented in this dissertation study. It reveals a gap at the very heart of the framework that must be identified, named, and explored in order to more fully understand Project ASPIRE’s ICDT as an equity- oriented interdisciplinary Community of Practice whose work might meaningfully contribute to social justice models of teacher education. By addressing that gap through 76 its investigation of four subcases within the ICDT, this dissertation study seeks to both extend the theories reviewed above and offer a new way of approaching STEM-Art interdisciplinarity. That new approach frames STEM-Art integration as a matter of equity and social justice to the extent that it seeks to identify, name, interrogate and disrupt conventional integration efforts. Such efforts have consistently failed to identify and theorize power inequities related to how disciplinary knowledge and disciplinary epistemologies are systemized and normalized in ways that impact how interdisciplinarity is enacted in schools and in the workforce. In the following chapter (Chapter 3), I introduce the methodology I used to build a new theory of interdisciplinarity based on the patterns that emerged from the data which were generated through the participants’ experiences in the ICDT.
77
Chapter 3:
A Post-Interpretevist Approach
Introduction
In this chapter, I describe the context of this dissertation study and my methods of data collection and analysis. Before delving into those details, however, I lay out the reasoning behind my methodology choices. Rather than originating from personal preference, convenience, or some other factor that could be considered somewhat arbitrary, I have deliberately aligned my methodological choices with the exigencies of the critical and interdisciplinary paradigms within which this dissertation study and its parent initiative, Project ASPIRE2, are situated. In this, I follow Ozanne and Saatcioglu
(2008), who argued that within any paradigm, theories and research methods are linked in a reciprocal relationship. Just as methods justify theories, “theories constrain the set of viable methods” that are available to researchers (Ozanne & Saatcioglu, 2008, p. 423).
Therefore, because my dissertation study’s overarching purpose is twofold—to participate in the reform of teacher preparation in the interest of social justice and to build research-based theory about STEM-Art interdisciplinarity—it requires a methodological approach that addresses both.
2 To achieve its goal of creating a model for the preparation of career urban educators in high-need, hard- to-staff subject areas, Project ASPIRE based its approach on the idea that teacher learning can be thought of an apprenticeship (Rogoff, 1990 & 1991) into a Community of Practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991). With its emphasis on practitioner reflexivity and asset pedagogies, Project ASPIRE’s model is committed to justice, equity and diversity and, therefore, to a critically minded, humanizing approach to education. 78 Szyjka (2012) proposed that a researcher’s methodological decisions should be grounded in pragmatism. Pragmatism is a philosophical tradition that originated at
Harvard University in the late nineteenth century and subsequently spread to the
University of Chicago. There, it was developed by progressive scholars—John Dewey foremost amongst them—who together comprised what is now known as “The Chicago
School”. At its core, pragmatism was grounded in the idea that social theories are useful insofar as they are practical and lead to the improvement of lives at the local and macro levels. According to Carey (1975), Chicago School pragmatists were deeply concerned with the relationship between the micro and macro, sharing “a deep sense of empathy with those whose lives and cultures they described” (p. 66). Moreover, they advocated for the importance not just of having empathy, but also using it within research endeavors in the interest of humanizing modern society (Farber, 1988). One of the most reliable strategies for leveraging empathy was the use of qualitative methods, which allowed researchers to become acquainted with the indigenous knowledge of community members whose experiences formed the subject of inquiry. As Farber (1988) explained, acquaintance comes from real experience and is the basis for understanding the inner lives of others and the subjective aspects of the social world. This conceptualization of the nature of experience is a critical construct that aligns a pragmatic approach to methodological choices with my equity-oriented dissertation study (Kadlec, 2006).
Whereas some critical theorists claimed that pragmatism was nothing more than the residue of positivism, fetishizing facts at the expense of reflection (Horkheimer, 1947), the critical, humanizing dimensions of pragmatism are consistent with a qualitative approach that prioritize reflection. In this dissertation study, I employ ethnographic
79 methods, which centralize lived experience as a repository for critical reflection (Kadlec,
2006). In this way, my ethnographic methods align with critical pragmatism, reifying the intersubjective, social knowledge that stems from lived experience (Dewey, 1929).
Ethnographic Methods
Ethnography, broadly conceptualized, refers to a primarily qualitative research approach in which the researcher becomes a participant-observer for prolonged periods of time in a particular social setting (Heath et al., 2004). Hammersley (2006) pointed out that, like most methodological terms, “ethnography” is used in different ways in different contexts. For purposes of this study, I rely on Mantzoukas’ (2010) approach to ethnographic research, which is organized into three main genres: classical, critical, and interpretive. Below I briefly describe each in order to demonstrate the relevance of a combined critical-interpretive approach to my dissertation study.
Classical ethnography. The first of the three genres, classical ethnography, finds its origins in the Western European colonialist attraction to “other” cultures whose social practices could be understood by an objective researcher physically entrenched in his study’s context in order to render authoritative, “ahistorical” accounts of how the culture worked (Boyle, 1994; Denzin, 1998; Mantzoukas, 2010). The unquestioned assumptions in this approach reflected an epistemological stance vis-à-vis the nature of reality in which the truth exists “out there”, free of human values or of any structurally embedded power relations. From this perspective, the truth has but to be discovered by the learned researcher, who would collect data from a “fly on the wall” position, thereby exposing a social group’s mechanisms through rich descriptions that would then be organized into neat taxonomies to be presented as grand theories devoid of authorial voice (Mantzoukas, 80 2010). As such, classic ethnography has become widely recognized as a major contributor to the oppression of marginalized groups, because it both views and presents such groups through the unchallenged, rigid, positivistic lens of the dominant white,
European-American, heterosexual, middle-class male.
Critical ethnography. A critical approach to naturalistic inquiry (i.e., research taking place in real-world settings with no attempt by the researcher to manipulate the phenomenon being studied) retains some of the classical ethnographer’s core methods for gathering data. Those core methods include prolonged immersion in the research setting, rich descriptions and participant observation. However, it challenges the notion that the social world under examination represents a immutable, conclusive reality (Mantzoukas,
2010). Instead, critical ethnography is defined by an epistemological belief that observable reality is created by underlying forces (cultural, political, economic, etc.) that are contextually determined. Further, social accounts are always shaped by the perspectives of the study’s participants (Mantzoukas, 2010). In keeping with the tradition of critical theory, critical ethnography has an explicit agenda: to hear the voices of those who are marginalized. That agenda is pursued through research that exposes and disrupts the invisible forces of hegemony, which determine how individuals are positioned within society (Mantzoukas, 2010; Rolfe, 1999; Smith, 2001). The ultimate goal of critical ethnographic methods is emancipatory, as researchers following this tradition prioritize, above all, helping those who are oppressed to see how the invisible forces of hegemony determine their status and subsequently, to resist and change it (Mantzoukas, 2010).
Interpretive ethnography. One limitation of critical ethnography is the premise that once reality is exposed and individuals are emancipated through the research project,
81 the work is complete (Mantzoukas, 2010). Interpretive ethnographers, however, operate from the post-structuralist perspective, viewing truth and knowledge as partial and incomplete. Therefore, any act of knowing cannot be separated from the subjective human activity of perception and communication. This means that any research account can never be the only valid account, and the researcher’s task is to provide an explanation of a social phenomenon with depth, detail and imagination. Ultimately, in a research study created through interpretive ethnographic methods, the researcher acknowledges and embraces his or her personal investment in the context and study participants. That personal connection is used as a tool for explaining a set of experiences characterizing the social phenomenon. Finally, the research report is presented as a narrative or series of narratives, which embrace lack of closure and reject definitive explanations. In this way, interpretive ethnography fosters an ongoing dialogue amongst stakeholders (Mantzoukas,
2010). The interpretive ethnographic approach is often taken up as an interdiscursive analysis in order to account for polyvocalities and discourse hybridities which blur the conventional boundaries of social life (Scollon, 2002; Chouliaraki & Fairclough, 1999).
Perhaps the most distinctive quality of interpretive ethnography is its creative, artful writing style, which allows its practitioners to approach the edges of arts-based research, and perhaps even fiction. This nontraditional approach is used to underscore and communicate the mutability of experience. In this way, researchers embrace the central
Post-Modern tenet that every human being (and, therefore, each research account) exists in a perpetual state of being and becoming. These ideas combine to justify featuring the researcher prominently within the text (Mantzoukas, 2010).
82 Blurring the boundaries. In many ways, an interpretive ethnographic approach aligns well with my dissertation study, which examines how art is explored and understood within an interdisciplinary Community of Practice. With art exemplifying other (and othered) ways of knowing, it challenges traditional, positivist-oriented research orthodoxies. One could argue that art and interpretive anthropology share the fundamental quality of “examining the ways in which the world is talked about rather than the way it is” (Geertz, 1983, p. 10). However, this dissertation study is not just about art. Rather, it involves art in relation to the STEM disciplines. As previously mentioned, the STEM disciplines are located within an entirely different paradigm: one that is defined by positivism and its outgrowths. Therefore, it is essential that I recognize the epistemological orientations of both domains, keeping at the top of my mind Nader’s
(1988) rejoinder that those who occupy opposing ends of the epistemological spectrum must engage in dialogue, because failure to do so invites backlash and the inability to realize a study’s potential. Accordingly, I follow an approach that Nader (1988), in the context of anthropology, described as “Post-Interpretivist”. That approach eschews methodological orthodoxy and gives me license to blend the critical pragmatism of the
Chicago School (despite, or perhaps consistent with, its positivist origins) with the more interpretivist inclinations of researchers deeply rooted in the arts. My justification for so doing comes from Nader (1988) who argued that it “is not possible for each of us to think with three or four different brains.” She continued,
Keeping the way open for cooperation and synthesis means discouraging . . . a methods obsession. If it appears that some are against method, it is in part because method obsessions easily over-shadow our reason for being— to think critically upon the nature of the human species, which requires tools that are both instrumental and expressive. (pp. 157-158)
83
Nader’s admonishment is particularly useful in this dissertation study, since methodological orthodoxy is fundamentally incongruous with the nature of any multi- paradigmatic, multi-perspectival inquiry.
Situating Myself in Multiple Roles
Regardless of how different dimensions of the critical and interprevist approaches are taken up in a post-interpretivist ethnographic study, the role of situating the researcher is shared. Situating the researcher aligns with critical ethnography’s impetus to unmask power relations, and it is fundamental to interpretivism’s epistemological premise that people are inseparable from their knowledge. Moreover, situating the researcher in my post-interpretivist approach creates a mutually inflecting relationship between its critical and interpretevist features, enhancing and reinforcing the tenets of both.
Criticality and personal dimensions of the research. Thomas (1993) pointed out that topics conducive to a critical approach are ones that the researcher is passionate about and can relate to personally. As the founding member and a central participant in the ICDT, I care deeply that its story be shared. I am passionately committed to understanding, analyzing and communicating the perspectives of my fellow participants whom I seek to honor as colleagues, friends, and co-creators of the STEM-Art
Community of Practice. Because of this, my emic position in relation to the ICDT phenomenon can be leveraged (rather than avoided) through critical ethnography. My own reflections thus become a requisite component of the research data set (Thomas,
1993), and I am obliged to be “radically self-reflective regarding [my] subjectivity”
(Madison, 2012, pp. 8-9). Taylor (1991) defined the concept of radical self-reflection as a 84 process of communicating and thinking about personal emotional experience within research. Rennie (2007) extended this idea, clarifying that “reflexivity has been defined as self-awareness, and radical reflexivity as awareness of self-awareness” (p. 53).
However, as Leary, Minichiello and Kottler (2010) pointed out, simply being self-aware is not enough. Rather, researchers must make conscious efforts to understand the relational and emotional intricacies between themselves and their study participants. This must be coupled with an understanding of how those intricacies impact the research process and product, including differences in power relationships (Kessl & Maurer,
2012).
While the ways in which a researcher can engage in radical reflexive practices are diverse (e.g., writing in research journals, expressing thoughts and feelings through art, being transparent about one’s subjective relationship to the research), I turn to Warren’s
(2011) perspective on reflexivity in relationship to pedagogy. He argued that, in drawing on their individual cultural experiences, educators can use critical ethnographic methods to reframe contemporary assessment. To do this, educators must ask themselves how their classroom assessment practices reproduce inequitable systems of power and what they might do to change them. If assessment were to become a site of exploration for educators, pushing them to examine what evidence of learning looks like when produced through progressive pedagogies, a pathway to teacher reflexivity would be created. As such, contemporary assessment would become a site for critical inquiry, instead of being only an oppressive, hegemonic tool to advance a right-wing agenda. Warren (2011) argued that conceptualizing assessment in this manner provides a powerful tool for resisting the assumption that evaluating student learning is a neutral process.
85 Like assessment in the age of accountability, the standard curriculum is often viewed as both mediator and reifying agent of stratified social relations in a technocratic, globalized world. Thus, I must confront my multiple and shifting subjectivitities in relation to the ICDT and, subsequently, in relation to this dissertation study. Those subjectivities include my role as (1) researcher (i.e., representative of institutionalized knowledge production), (2) director of a partner institution (outsider to both the university and the school district and authoritative on art), and (3) co-designer/team member (equal player on the curriculum team and outsider to the university/school district authority). In these ways, critical ethnography helps me to consider the ICDT
(and, therefore, the curriculum design process we utilized as well as the actual curricula we created) as a site for critical conversations that deterritorialize systems of privilege and authority (Denison & Lincoln, 2011; King-White, 2013; Martin & Kamberelis,
2013).
Radical reflexivity.
“The starting-point of critical elaboration,” Gramsci (1971) declared, “is the consciousness of what one really is, and is ‘knowing thyself’ as a product of the historical process to date which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory” (p. 324).
Ethnography emphasizes the role of the researcher as part of the context. (In qualitative research, “context” refers not only to the immediate physical environment, local conditions, and demographics, but also the historical and social factors that shape the lives of the research participants.) As a participant-observer, s/he provides a first-hand account and, ultimately, analysis of the interconnected patterns of dynamic, meaning- making processes, which people engage in together within that context (Hammersley,
86 2006; Heath & Street, 2008). An ethnographic approach, therefore allows me to account for the ICDT in a way that is authentic to the group’s particular history—a history that includes my own long-term and in-depth connection to the participants and the work we undertook together. In this way, I position myself within the tradition of constructivists who, as Guba (1990) puts it, “not only abjure objectivity but celebrate subjectivity” (p.
17). This stance allows me to pay attention to the processes I used to gather and present the knowledge, perspectives, pedagogical, and/or disciplinary decisions of the participants for consideration by a scholarly community. The actual construction of the knowledge, as Blommaert and Jie (2010) advised, constitutes the study’s resulting knowledge in and of itself. Accordingly, this study must document the group’s— including my own— “journey through knowledge” (Blommaert & Jie, 2010, p. 10), which began nearly seven years ago, in the summer of 2009.
At that time, I was co-Executive Director of a small, grassroots nonprofit organization. The mission of the organization involved complementing public school education through studio-based programs in the visual arts for pre-K through adult learners. In addition to after-school classes, we offered in-school arts-integration programming, in collaboration with classroom teachers and with consultation from
Harvard University’s Project Zero. Looking to support that work, I regularly reviewed federal grant announcements for pertinent funding opportunities. That process led me to a
Request for Proposals by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Innovation and
Improvement under its Teacher Quality Partnership (TQP) program. The purpose of the
TQP initiative was to “improve student achievement; improve the quality of new and prospective teachers by improving the preparation of prospective teachers and enhancing
87 professional development activities for new teachers; hold teacher preparation programs at institutions of higher education (IHEs) accountable for preparing highly qualified teachers; and recruit highly qualified individuals, including minorities and individuals from other occupations, into the teaching force” (U.S. Department of Education, 2009).
One of the organization’s board members (a retired childhood literacy scholar and accomplished abstract painter) and I suggested to Project ASPIRE’s university partner that the arts be included in the grant proposal it was preparing for submission to the TQP program. Much to our delight, the grant’s principal investigators agreed, and we wrote a role for the arts into the proposal. My organization thus became Project ASPIRE’s arts partner. Other partners were enterprises from both industry and government and included the largest school district in the state (Columbus City Schools), Battelle for Kids,
Nationwide Insurance, the university’s College of Arts and Sciences, the state
Department of Education and the state Board of Regents. Later that summer, the Project
ASPIRE proposal was funded by the U.S. Department of Education, and the university thus became one of the 28 grant recipients who, together, were awarded a total of approximately 143 million dollars.
The role of art and the my nonprofit organization was initially small, as Project
ASPIRE’s core activities focused on preparing Master of Education (M.Ed.) students for careers teaching science, mathematics and world languages (areas designated high-need and hard-to-staff by the school district). That small scale allowed the art component to maintain a relatively low profile during the initial stages the project and for us to focus first on learning more about the overarching project goals and context. Building
88 relationships with the partner institutions and their representatives, particularly the school district, was paramount.
There were several factors that made prioritizing relationship building so important. First, the arts organization was located in a middle-class suburban community approximately 30 miles from the urban center that was home to the university and school district. Adopting a respectful, learner stance was important, not only because this attitude is conductive to teamwork, but also because the idea of a suburban organization participating in the design of a model urban program was problematic. For example, how would Project ASPIRE stakeholders be assured that the suburban organization would not impose its hegemonic values, norms and practices on the urban community, which had its own set of distinct (and varied) cultural values, norms and practices? The project partners were well justified in asking why the endeavor included a suburban arts organization rather than one located within the community. To acknowledge the importance of asking such questions is to acknowledge differences in the socioeconomic status of predominantly white suburban communities and that of predominantly non-white urban ones. While there are multiple categories of difference that must be accounted for, race is primary among these. In Project ASPIRE, the racial identities of the school district team members were representative of the communities within which the participating school buildings were located. Those team members were predominantly African American, whereas I am a non-Hispanic white female—the typical profile of a middle-class suburbanite. It would be reasonable to fear that an arts component led by my organization would reify, rather than disrupt, dominant culture. Given the circumstances and demographics of this part of Project ASPIRE, the danger that the arts component would
89 support, rather than disrupt, white privilege was very real. In this environment, therefore,
I was acutely aware of my outsider status. In early meetings, I imagined that I sensed an undercurrent of trepidation vis-à-vis my presence and the presence of a suburban arts organization in the project. I recall feeling anxious to be a respectful ally yet also being aware that learning and relationship building take time.
What the partners could not know at the time was the perspective with which I approached the realm of visual art. Years earlier, I had earned a master’s degree in art history at the University of Chicago, where the art history department (and my own interests) centered on critical visual literacy, postmodernism and power relations as they are formed and expressed through visual sign systems. My subsequent work at the San
Francisco Museum of Modern Art was also focused on these issues, whether through public exhibitions of artwork by justice-oriented artists (e.g., Carrie Mae Weems, Kara
Walker, Jim Goldberg) or through the educational materials I produced and collaborated on with other curatorial staff, the education department, or public relations and marketing teams. In Project ASPIRE, particularly at the beginning, I was passionate about not reinforcing hegemony through the visual arts but rather the opposite. I sought to use them as a tool for helping students develop creative thinking skills and multi-perspectival understanding of content. Most importantly, I wanted to help them disrupt the
Eurocentric grip on the definition of “fine art” or what Sandoval (2000) referred to as a
“rhetoric of supremacy” (p. 150). At the same time, I wanted to make sure that the arts would be valued for their inherent qualities, that they would not be taken up and used as a handmaiden to the other disciplines. And, of central importance to me was using my role to advocate for artists and their expert knowledge in matters of aesthetic expression.
90 Looking for Magic: the Pursuit of Authentic Interdisciplinarity
At an early capacity-building meeting held during the first year of the grant award, two of the university’s researchers—both Project ASPIRE investigators/administrators—asked if my organization had a methodology for arts integration. At that point, I was not part of a doctoral program, and I was not a social scientist. I came from the arts and the humanities, and, therefore, I was an outsider to education research discourse. I had no way of knowing what it really meant to have a methodology. I distinctly recall, however, explaining that while I did not know how to describe what happened when art and other subjects were successfully woven together in a collaborative curriculum design process, it was something very special. I used the term
“magical”.
Seeking to explain that magic, advance the ICDT work, and further my own understandings, I began doctoral studies in the second year of the grant period. I also received co-investigator status and IRB approval to conduct research with the ICDT group members (IRB Protocol 20090414). My hope was that by pursuing doctoral studies in relation to the ICDT, I would learn to see, understand and explain the interdisciplinary process. I also wanted to learn how to develop and articulate a methodology for substantive arts integration so as to help center the arts within education reform conversations. Over time, with my new identities as a doctoral student, graduate research associate, and emerging urban educator, I came to experiment with new forms of reflexivity that allowed me to both actualize the aforementioned goals and perform my varied roles with an ever-evolving critical consciousness. For me, bringing these two domains together was a way to address the inequities that exist in various forms between
91 STEM and the arts (whether those forms be related to funding, the curriculum, cultural capital, etc.). Most importantly, I wished to apply what I was learning about critical multiculturalism to the theories and practices of differentiated classroom instruction and assessment. My concern in this regard was creating space for those whose epistemological and ontological orientations differ from those that tend to define and determine educational and 21st-century workforce success (i.e., those belonging to the
Eurocentric, rationalist/positivist tradition traditions). For all of these reasons, I have located my dissertation study within the critical paradigm, and I argue that schooling which fails to account for, and equally value, othered epistemologies is guilty of reproducing structural privilege. I thus seek to create a model for STEM-Art equilibrium, in which different systems of knowing have the opportunity to equally “shape perceptions, public memories and imaginative possibilities around what is sayable, doable and thinkable” (Mane, 2012, p. 74).
Situating the Study
The school district. This study took place within the largest city of a Midwestern state, and within that state’s largest school district (comprised of approximately 51,000 students dispersed throughout 109 schools). Given its size and location, the district’s students experience firsthand many of the challenges that face large urban populations, such as high poverty (69 percent of the student body receives a free or reduced-priced meal), high student mobility (19.7 percent), low test performance, and low graduation rates. During the six years of the study, the district fell dramatically short of state standards in achievement, gap closing, value-added progress, and graduation rates.
92 Table 1 provides data from the most recent school year (2013-14). The district report card is representative of the schools whose teachers participated in this dissertation study.
Table 1. 2014 School District Report Card Percentage Grade Achievement: Performance Index 66.5% D Indicators Met 8.3% F Gap Closing 17.3% F Value-Added Overall n/a F Graduation Rate 77.0% F Source: Department of Education for the State of Ohio
However, despite its straightforward seeming letter grades and percentage points, the report card does not tell the full story of the students’ or their teachers’ performance.
Noguera (2008) argued that such data must be understood as the combined product of cultural, structural, and identity-construction forces that interrelate in complicated ways.
One of the most significant complicating factors in the above report card was a data scrubbing scandal in which 60 district employees have been investigated for altering data in order to manipulate performance ratings on the district’s state report card as well as improperly access funds allocated for supplemental educational tutoring. Unfortunately, district teachers have been associated with the scandal, yet the individuals investigated were nearly all administrators (including building principals). In the midst of these conditions, the teacher participants in my dissertation study have provided an alternative narrative of integrity, rigor, and innovation. That narrative is important because it has the capacity to broaden the larger discourse shaping teacher performance, STEM-Art integration and, ultimately, student achievement.
As Noguera (2010) argued and the above report card demonstrates, public schools normalize the failure of urban students, many of who are people of color. When this
93 happens, districts and schools are guilty of complacency, and they embody a lack of critical consciousness. Gutiérrez (2008) warned that focusing on achievement gaps is inherently deficit-oriented, as it ignores the knowledge, skills and rich cultural resources that marginalized students bring to their classrooms. She suggested that equity-oriented scholars should adopt an anti “gap-gazing” lens. This stance requires researchers to focus on what exactly constitutes academic excellence, including, but not limited to, demonstrating understanding in multiple modalities and high performance on assessments (Gutiérrez, 1996/2007/2008; Gutstein, 2006; Education Trust, 2005). It is through this lens that I view the student and teacher demographics of the school district.
Student demographics. The district’s student body is diverse in multiple ways, most notably in terms of students’ racial and ethnic backgrounds. Twenty-six percent of the total student body is comprised of white students, with the other 74% made up of students belonging to non-white racial groups. The majority of the student body population is comprised of Black students, with 56% identifying as African American.
(See table 2.) The non-white population also includes many students of Somali descent, as Columbus is the second largest Somali community in the United States. The English
Language Learning (ELL) needs of Somali and other non-native English speakers are paramount in the district, as 13.2% of the student population has limited English proficiency. In fact, over 100 languages are spoken by students in the district. These demographic figures are important, because they provide insight into the ethnic and racial make-up of the overall student body. When considered in concert with the district report card grades (Table 1), these data attest to the need for increased opportunities for student success. Those opportunities include fostering and sustaining ways for teachers to
94 develop innovative approaches to teaching. STEM-Art integration represents one possible innovative approach, and, therefore, in-depth understanding of what constitutes a rigorous pedagogical approach to interdisciplinarity, is an essential component of meeting the needs of urban students.
Table 2. 2013-14 Columbus City Schools Student Demographics Native Hawaiian/ Black White Hispanic Asian American Pac Island Multi-Racial Total No. 28,650 13,429 4,448 1,481 99 3 2,760 Percentage 56% 26% 9% 3% 0.2% 0.006% 5% Source: Department of Human Resources, Data & Systems for the District
Teacher demographics. The district employs more than 3,000 full-time teachers, and consistent with national trends, over 70 percent of the teaching force is female. Approximately 63 percent of teachers are white, 35 percent are African
American, 1.2 percent are Hispanic. The remaining 0.8 percent are Asian, Native
American, or Native Alaskan. The ethnic and racial background of teachers participating in Project ASPIRE and the ICDT is consistent with these demographics. All four of the teachers who participated in this dissertation study are white females.
The Innovative Curriculum Design Team (ICDT)
This dissertation study examines the experiences of four Innovative Curriculum
Design Team (ICDT) participants in particular. Before discussing their backgrounds in depth, it is important to first situate them within the overarching case of the ICDT.
Approximately forty teachers participated in the group for varying lengths of time and with varying depth of engagement over the six years of the dissertation study. In the first
95 year, no teachers were involved, as the project’s activities focused on capacity building, including the recruitment of participants. Therefore, for purposes of this dissertation study, I refer to each of the project years based on active involvement of teachers. (In other words, “year 1” was actually year 2 of Project ASPIRE). In the ICDT’s first year, university and district project administrators selected four teachers for participation in the group. The following year, six additional teachers were included. The third year saw eight of the teachers retained. However, due to the field placement needs of Project
ASPIRE M.Ed. students (as dictated by their chosen areas of licensure), two teachers were replaced by three new teachers. By year 4, district and university administrators wove the ICDT into the mainstream of the project in order to diffuse its innovations and embed them within the sustainability plan. This decision was based on positive response of ICDT participants and ongoing evidence of student gains. For this reason, administrators required all 25 of the project’s year 4 participating M.Ed. mentor teachers to join the group. Because the 25 teachers were selected based on the certification needs of the year 4 M.Ed. students, all but three of the previous participants were officially retained as group members, resulting in 22 new participants. In the fifth (sixth and final year of the grant), participation dictates were loosened (as no stipends were offered), and all cooperating teachers from the project’s history were invited to take part in the ICDT.
Approximately fifteen teachers joined the group, including ten from prior years. Five of the remaining teachers came from outside Project ASPIRE, having been encouraged to join by enthusiastic veterans. Included in the year 5 total was one recent graduate of the
Project ASPIRE program who was in her second year of teaching in the district. This final year thus resulted in a group that expanded the boundaries of the project’s initial
96 configurations. Table 3 describes all of the ICDT teachers according to their subject areas and years of participation.
Table 3. Total ICDT teacher participation across 5 years Number of Teachers Subject Area Years in ICDT 7 Mathematics 1 3 Mathematics 2 1 Mathematics 4 9 Science 1 1 Science 2 2 Science 3 4 Science 4 7 World Languages 1 2 World Languages 2 1 World Languages 3 1 Inclusion (All Content Areas) 2 1 English Language & Literature 1 1 Art 1
ICDT Activities
While remaining centered on the curriculum design inquiry, the ICDT activities varied somewhat from year to year, depending on the particular needs and circumstances of Project ASPIRE. As mentioned above, in the first year of the ICDT, there were only four teachers in the group. Each of these participants took turns working intensively with an arts integration specialist (me). Throughout that year, I spent every day either co- planning and/or co-teaching arts-integrated units of study with the two science teachers and the two French teachers. My time was divided between the teachers relative to the requirements of the arts-integrated units we designed and in relation to the degree of interest expressed by each of the four teachers. Table 4 describes the ICDT classroom- based activities that were undertaken in the first year. It does not account for the
97 approximately ten hours of co-planning time that took place each week, outside of the regular classroom hours.
Table 4. Year 1 classroom-based activities Total Number of Dissertation Number of Arts- Participant # Content Area Instructional Topic(s) Addressed Case Study Integrated Units Days visible light spectrum, observations & inferences, forces & 1 Physical Science Y 4 72 motion, energy transfer 2 Biology N 2 9 mitosis & miosis, genetics/DNA French Revolution, Social Justice, Identity, Les Miserables, 3 French N 1 21 Arab Spring French Revolution, Social Justice, Identity, Les Miserables, 4 French N 1 21 Arab Spring
According to the needs of each curricular unit, I also engaged in planning and consultation with teaching artists employed by the partner arts organization.
Occasionally, those artists would join the participating teacher and me in the classroom, collaborating on the instruction of studio art techniques and methods. Figure 4 presents a summary of the co-planning and co-teaching activities according to the year 1 structure.
It also represents the nascent STEM-Art interdisciplinary Community of Practice.
98 Figure 4. Year 1 ICDT structure
When university and district administrators added the six additional teachers in the second year, I reconceptualized the group’s structures and activities (See figure 5 and table 5).
99 10 Teachers (Science/Career Tech, Math, French) + Whole Group Meetings Art Specialist/Researcher (A.S./R.) +
Art Teacher
4 Science 3 Math 3 French Teachers Teachers Teachers (2 Career Tech) + + + Art Specialist/ Art Specialist/ Subgroup Meetings Art Specialist/ Researcher Researcher Researcher (A.S./R.) (A.S./R.) (A.S./R.) + + + Art Teacher Art Teacher Art Teacher
Occasional Activiites
Science Math Teacher French Teacher + Teacher (including Career Tech) Art Specialist/ + + Researcher Art Specialist/ Individual Planning Meetings (A.S./R.) Art Specialist/Researcher (A.S./R.) Researcher Art Specialist/ + + Researcher (A.S./R.) Studio artists @ Partner Organization + (A.S./R.) Art Teacher + Art Teacher Art Teacher x 4 x 3 x 3
1 Teacher + Students Studio artists from Classroom Implementation + Art Teacher x 10 partner organization + A.S./R.
Two full-day studio art immersive experiences
Culminating 1-day exhibition of student work at Project ASPIRE year-end celebration
Figure 5. Year 2 ICDT structure
During the second year, the whole group met once a month (two hours after school) to discuss common interdisciplinary experiences centered on the arts. Every teacher also met in disciplinary subgroups (i.e., one group with the science teachers, one with the mathematics teachers, and one with the foreign language teachers) for two additional hours each month. In those disciplinary subgroups, the inquiry focused on arts integration as it pertained to the relevant subject area. I facilitated all of those meetings, and I 100 continued co-planning as well as co-teaching arts-integrated units of study with each individual teacher over the course of that year. As a result, every teacher participated in meetings an average of 16 times for two to three hours over the course of year 2. They each also engaged in approximately 40 hours of co-planning and co-teaching during the same time period.
Table 5. Year 2 classroom-based activities
Total Number of Dissertation Number of Arts- Participant # Content Area Instructional Topic(s) Addressed Case Study Integrated Units Days visible light spectrum, observations & inferences, forces & 1 Physical Science Y 6 50 motion, energy transfer, waves, environment 2 Biology N 2 8 mitosis & miosis, genetics/DNA 3 French N 1 16 Impressionism & Post-Impressionism/identity & hegemony 4 French N 1 16 Le Petit Nicolas/Writer’s Voice & Art Brut 5 French N 1 3 French art/artists & philosophy of art 6 Career Tech Y 2 12 genetically modified organisms/world hunger 7 Career Tech Y 1 4 wall gardens as food & art 8 HS Mathematics Y 1 8 slope/creating, solving & modeling linear equations 9 HS Mathematics N 1 6 probability 10 HS Mathematics N 1 6 congruence/transformation in the plane
Given the increased workload, I hired a white, female art teacher who had recently completed a K-12 visual art certification and a master’s degree in arts education at the university. Consistent with Rogoff’s (1991) apprenticeship theory in which novices become skilled in the cognitive activities of their communities through increasingly challenging, repeated and varied experiences, the art teacher initially worked exclusively with me. Gradually, she took on more responsibility for independently co-planning and co-teaching with participating teachers as her knowledge of the ICDT and its interdisciplinary practices increased in the remaining years of the project.
Another key feature that was introduced in the second year (and repeated in the third year) was two day-long, immersive studio art experiences for all of the participating teachers: one in the fall and one in the spring of each year. The arts immersion experience was created in response to one of the original participating science teachers who had
101 shared how important it had been to her understanding of art that I took her to the arts facility and to several artists’ studios when she and I were developing arts-integrated units the previous year. During the studio field trips, many of the teachers had their first adult experiences with studio art. Those experiences included looking at art using critical visual inquiry protocols, painting in acrylic, creating fine art photographs using 35 mm digital SLR cameras, conceptualizing and building 3-D installations and more. Figures
6-8 illustrate a selection of the experiences.
Figure 6. Science (career tech) teacher learning plein air, representational
painting at an artist’s studio
Figure 7. Science teachers participating in an immersive studio art experience in which they collaboratively designed and created an abstract, conceptual artwork expressing their experience in the ICDT.
102
Figure 8. Science, mathematics and French teachers participating in an immersive studio art experience in which they collaboratively designed and created an abstract, conceptual artwork expressing their experience in the ICDT.
In year 4, university and district administrators removed two teachers from the group for budgetary reasons. This caused dismay for other members of the group who had all, already, formed close personal and professional relationships with each other during the previous year. In fact, the group members were so committed to each other that the eight remaining teachers offered to pool their stipends and divide them equally amongst the ten in an effort to keep the group intact. However, the project administrators ultimately rejected this offer, because they wanted to retain a desired cadre of potential mentor teachers who could meet the academic needs of the pre-service candidates (i.e., content area expertise and specialization/experience in certification areas). The same basic structure of activities as that of year 2 was continued, including the whole-group
103 and disciplinary subgroup meetings, the two studio art immersive experiences and the one-on-one co-planning and co-teaching sessions with me and the art teacher. (See table
6 and figure 9.)
Table 6. Year 3 classroom-based activities
Total Number of Dissertation Number of Arts- Participant # Content Area Instructional Topic(s) Addressed Case Study Integrated Units Days visible light spectrum, observations & inferences, forces & 1 Physical Science X 7 35 motion, energy transfer, waves, environment, water cycle 2 Biology 1 6 water cycle 3 French 1 8 imperfect & past simple verb tenses 4 French N/I 0 N/A 5 French N/I 0 N/A seeing/representing cells using an electron microscope; cell 6 Career Tech X 4 15 morphology, GMOs & world hunger world hunger/food resource generation/biotechnology 7 Career Tech 1 10 solutions slope/creating, solving & modeling linear equations; 8 HS Math X 2 8 congruence/transformation in the plane 9 HS Math 1 6 probability 10 HS Math 1 7 similarity & right triangles 11 MS Math 0 0 N/A 12 MS Science Y 1 8 introduction to cellular biology: organelles 13 MS Science 1 5 Ecosystems & their scales 14 Inclusion 0 0 N/A
104 12 Teachers (HS Science/Career Tech, MS Science, Math, French, Inclusion)* + Whole Group Meetings Arts Integration Specialist/Researcher (A.S./R.) + Art Teacher
6 Science 4 Math 1 French Teachers* Teachers** Teacher (2 Career Tech) + + + Art Specialist/ Art Specialist/ Subgroup Meetings Art Specialist/ Researcher Researcher Researcher (A.S./R.) (A.S./Rz.) (A.S./R.) + + + Art Teacher Art Teacher Art Teacher Occasional Activiites
Science Math French Teacher Teacher* Teacher (including + Career Tech)* + Art Specialist/ + Art Specialist/ Researcher Art Specialist/Researcher (A.S./R.) Individual Planning Meetings Researcher Art Specialist/ (A.S./R.) + (A.S./R.) Researcher + Studio artists @ Partner Organization (A.S./R.) + + Art Teacher Art Teacher Art Teacher x 5 x 3 x 1
1 Teacher + Students Studio artists from Classroom Implementation + partner organization Art Teacher x 9 + A.S./R.
Two full-day studio art immersive experiences * 3 of these teachers attended whole and subgroup meetings only occasionally. They did not engage in individual planning with the arts educators, nor did they implement arts integrated curricular units in their classrooms. Culminating 1-day exhibition of student work at Project ASPIRE year-end celebration ** The inclusion teacher occasionally attended the math subgroup meeting.
Figure 9. Year 3 ICDT structure
In year 4 of the project, any cooperating teacher who served as a mentor was required to attend the ICDT professional development so that its methods would be diffused to their assigned M.Ed. student interns during their field placement. Given the other professional development needs of the program, teachers were only available to meet once a month, a total of six times over the course of the school year. Meetings lasted for two hours, and approximately 12-15 teachers actually attended each required
105 meeting. The meetings were more traditional in their structure, with less emphasis on design inquiry. This approach was taken as a way to synchronize with the other forms of professional development opportunities occurring throughout the project and to address the diverse needs of group newcomers as well as veterans. In addition, there were no longer any disciplinary subgroup meetings nor were there any immersive studio art experiences. Teachers who expressed interest in co-planning and co-teaching were able to do so with the art teacher and me, and by the end of the year, eight teachers had experienced in-depth co-planning and co-teaching. Approximately four other teachers attempted to design and implement lessons on their own, based on ideas generated in the group meetings. While they were not part of the official year 4 group, two of my case study participants continued to implement the arts-integrated units designed in years 1-3: one with in-class co-teaching by the art teacher and myself, and one without any such assistance. Table 7 represents the year 4 classroom-based activities, and figure 10 summarizes the year 4 ICDT structure.
106
Table 7. Year 4 classroom-based activities Total # of Dissertation Number of Arts- Participant # Content Area Instructional Topic(s) Addressed Case Study Integrated Units Days visible light spectrum, observations & inferences, forces & 1 Physical Science X 5 0 motion, energy transfer, waves, environment, water cycle 2 Biology N/I 0 N/A 3 French graduate school 0 N/A 4 French N/I 0 N/A 5 French N/I 0 N/A 6 Career Tech X 3 5 cell morphology, serial dilutions, protein synthesis 7 Career Tech 1 2 soil horizons slope/creating, solving & modeling linear equations; 8 Math X 2 5 congruence/transformation in the plane 9 HS Math N/I 0 N/A 10 HS Math retired N/A N/A 11 MS Math N/I 0 N/A 12 MS Science X 2 10 introduction to cellular biology: organelles, states of matter 13 MS Science N/I 0 N/A 14 Inclusion N/I 0 N/A 15 MS Science 1 8 Soil Horizons 16-18 MS Science 0 0 N/A 19-22 HS Science 1 4 form and properties of water molecules 23 HS Science 1 0 entropy 24 MS Math 1 0 geometry: angles 25 MS Math 0 0 N/A 26-28 HS Math 0 0 N/A 29 Spanish 1 8 political unrest in Venezuela & Resistance Art 30 Spanish 1 0 culinary arts of Spain 31-34 Spanish 0 0 N/A 35 Chinese 1 6 Chinese characters & radicals: emotion 36 Chinese 1 7 Chinese domestic architecture 37 ELA 1 4 literary denotation/connotation & community
107 27 Teachers (HS Science/Career Tech, MS Science, HS & MS Math, Chinese, Spanish, ELA) + Whole Group Meetings* Arts Integration Specialist/Researcher (A.S./R.) + Art Teacher
Science Foreign 1 ELATeacher Teachers Language (including Teachers + Career Tech)* (Spanish, Art Specialist/ + Chinese) Researcher Individual Planning Meetings Art Specialist/ + (A.S./R.) Researcher Art Specialist/ + (A.S./R.) Researcher Art Teacher + (A.S./R.) Art Teacher + Art Teacher X 5 x 3 x 1
1 Teacher + 1 Teacher Classroom Implementation M.Ed. Students + + M.Ed. Students Students X 9 + + X 4 + Students Art Teacher + A.S./R.
1-day professional development Additional Activities 4-venue culminating exhibition at contemporary art museum at locations throughout the city
* 27 teachers were required to attend the 7 whole group meetings. Approximately 12-15 actually attended each meeting. 9 teachers requested co-planning and co-teaching collaboration with the arts integration specialist and art teacher. Those 9 teachers received the requested support.
Figure 10. Year 4 ICDT structure
The fifth final year of the ICDT ended just several months prior to the submission of this dissertation study. The structure of year 5 involved monthly meetings, each lasting for approximately two and a half hours. As the end of the grant period was drawing to a close, no teachers were compensated and/or required to attend the meetings. Each of the ten meetings was regularly attended by thirteen teachers, all of who engaged—for varying lengths of time—in co-planning and co-teaching with the art teacher and me.
Two of the teachers were graduates of the Project ASPIRE M.Ed. program and were in their early residency years within the partner district. Several teachers had never been
108 part of Project ASPIRE but were recruited into the ICDT by enthusiastic participants.
Most of the participants had been long-term members of the ICDT and were highly committed to the group’s interdisciplinary, arts-integration approach. At that point, these teachers needed little planning and in-class support from the art teacher and from me to implement prior ICDT lessons. However, those who requested individual co-planning and co-teaching (whether they were new to arts integration and the ICDT or they were veterans designing new lessons) were provided with both. Group meetings focused on supporting newcomers and sharing ideas related to new arts-integrated lessons. In addition, the group undertook a day-long immersive experience at a contemporary art museum. Finally, participants collaborated on a culminating student art exhibition, which traveled to four different public locations throughout the city, from the spring of 2015 through the spring of 2016. The year 5 classroom activities are explained in table 8. The year 5 ICDT structure is represented in figure 11.
Table 8. Year 5 classroom-based activities
Dissertation Number of Arts- Total # of Participant # Content Area Topic(s) Addressed Case Study Integrated Units Instructional Days
visible light spectrum, observations & inferences, forces & 1 Physical Science X 5 0 motion, energy transfer, waves, environment, water cycle 2 Biology N/I 0 N/A 3 French graduate school 0 N/A 4 French 1 15 literary voice, reading/writing in French, outsider art (Art Brut) 5 French N/I 0 N/A 6 Career Tech X 3 5 cell morphology, serial dilutions, protein synthesis 7 Career Tech 1 2 soil horizons, landscape design using Autodesk CAD slope/creating, solving & modeling linear equations; 8 HS Mathematics X 2 5 congruence, pattern 9 HS Mathematics N/I 0 N/A 10 HS Mathematics retired N/A N/A 11 MS Mathematics N/I 0 N/A cells (organelles), states of matter, soil horizons, body 12 MS Science X 4 15 systems 13 MS Science 1 4 water cycle 14 Inclusion N/I 0 N/A 15 MS Science retired N/A N/A 16-18 MS Science N/I 0 N/A 19-23 HS Science N/I 0 N/A 24-25 MS Math N/I 0 N/A 26-28 HS Math N/I 0 N/A 29 Spanish 1 8 Frida Khalo, Mexican Modernism & identity 30-34 Spanish N/I 0 N/A 35-36 Chinese N/I 0 N/A 37 ELA 1 0 character change over time (past, present, future) verb conjugations; reading & writing French literature, Art 38 French 1 20 Brut 39 HS Math 1 6 statistics: linear regression & correlation 40 Art 1 0 ceramics, activist art, installation art 109
12 Teachers (HS Science/Career Tech, MS Science, HS Math, French, Spanish, MS Social Studies, ELA) + Whole Group Meetings Arts Integration Specialist/Researcher (A.S./R.) + Art Teacher
Science Foreign Math 1 ELATeacher 1 Art Teacher Teachers Language Teachers* + + (including + Teachers Career Tech)* (Spanish, Art Specialist/ Art Specialist/ + Art Specialist/ French) Researcher Researcher Researcher Individual Planning Meetings Art Specialist/ + (A.S./R.) (A.S./R.) (A.S./R.) + + Researcher + Art Specialist/ (A.S./R.) Researcher Art Teacher Art Teacher + Art Teacher (A.S./R.) Art Teacher + Art Teacher X 6 x 1 x 3 x 1 x 1
1 Teacher Classroom Implementation + 1 Teacher Students + + X 7 Students X 5 Art Teacher + + A.S./R.
1-day professional development Additional Activities 4-venue culminating exhibition at contemporary art museum at locations throughout the city
Figure 11. Year 5 ICDT activities
Case Selection
Seawright and Gerring (2008) argued that in small sample studies, choosing cases is a particularly challenging, yet fundamentally important, endeavor. This is because participants who serve as the cases are “asked to perform a heroic role: to stand for
(represent) a population of cases that is often much larger than the case itself” (p. 294).
Four participants were chosen for this dissertation study, and I rely on them to represent the larger case of the ICDT, specifically, and STEM-Art integration Communities of
110 Practice, generally. They do indeed perform a heroic role in this study. These four individuals all participated in the ICDT for four years and they all teach either science or mathematics. They also stand out as the four people who dedicated the most time to both co-planning and co-teaching the STEM-Art integrated curricular units over the course of the ICDT’s existence. Finally, these four individuals all actively attempted to apprentice their peers as well as pre-service STEM teachers into the practice of STEM-Art integration. For these reasons, they distinguished themselves as the ICDT participants possessing the most in-depth knowledge of the Community of Practice and its approach to STEM-Art interdisciplinarity. In sharing these characteristics, they emerge from the whole group as a homogenous, typical sampling (Given, 2008). Such non-random sampling—commonly referred to as “purposeful” (see, e.g., Maxwell, 2005) or
“purposive” (see, e.g., Walker, Nunez, Walkingstick & Banack, 2004)—is appropriate in qualitative studies where information-rich cases can shed unique light on a particular phenomenon (Patton, 2002).
The Four Cases
The four cases are four remarkable women who contributed tirelessly to the
ICDT’s inquiry, to Project ASPIRE, and to my dissertation study. In the spirit of collaboration and participatory research and in recognition of the fact that each of the women are the ultimate experts of their own lives, I decided to ask them to contribute their own background descriptions. Each of those is included here below, with the exception of the first participant, who at the time of this writing, has moved on from teaching high school physical science to other endeavors beyond formal education. For this participant’s description, I have provided a reflection she wrote as an explanatory
111 text that was included within a culminating exhibition showcasing student artworks resulting from the ICDT’s second year. The letter reflects this participant’s teaching (and life) philosophy.
Caren. Before I became a part of Project ASPIRE’s Innovative Curriculum
Design Team, I thought of myself as unartistic and unknowing in discussions of art and design. I had visited an occasional art museum, attended an occasional art show or exhibition and yet, I was content to think of art and the art world as something separate from me, my life, and certainly the science classroom.
I remember my first visit to the art studio in my first year with the ICDT. It felt magical, filled with creativity, possibility, depth, awareness and insight. I walked around the Gallery, reading the artist statements of pre-K students through teenagers, amazed!
Then, I visited the homes of two local artists. It was an incredibly powerful and transformative day. Something in me recognized the vast potential of incorporating art into science. While I was unsure of the “how’s,” I knew something magical was going on, and I totally trusted the process, content to participate, yet fully aware that I didn’t need to know nor understand— how trusting that “it” would unfold as we each participated from our respective places of experience and genius.
Each art experience that first year was palatable as a “hum” took over my science classroom, enveloping the students in a safe, peace-filled place of self-expression. Our first lesson, including mine, was learning to see, shifting perspective from macro to micro and back, allowing the creative process to unfold: all skills counter to our school environment and teaching pedagogies. Learning; awareness, connections, shifting perspectives and the creation of knowledge, took on a life and an energy of their own as
112 each class formed an even tighter bond when they shared, discussed, listened, and reflected upon their processes and the interaction of art and science. That first year was magical.
Last summer, as part of my summer vacation, I included a trip to Georgia
O’Keefe’s Art Gallery as well as Los Alamos, looking at all of my travels through the lens of both artist and scientist and wondering how I could incorporate these experiences from my travels into my classroom. Eventually the lenses combined and like the students,
I became more adept and efficient at shifting perspectives and creating connections. Now my ideas around education, science, art and curriculum are currently being re-wired into an integrative web-style model. As you can infer, I have been deeply moved and transformed by this experience. As a member of the Project ASPIRE Innovative
Curriculum Design Team, I have seen our group of teachers travel through the spectrum of group phases and stages, from “forming,” “norming”, and “performing” to excelling.
Teacher members have looked forward to Monday meetings, commenting that this is the best PD they’ve had and often staying later to chat, share and discuss ideas. I have witnessed both individual and collective growth and change. I constantly find myself reflecting upon learning and teaching and ways to interface art, science and life. I am reminded that teaching is itself an art form and that we must keep the flame lit by nurturing the creative energies within.
Pam. I am a veteran educator with Columbus City Schools; I have worked in this urban district for over 30 years. My initial training was as an agricultural educator, but I have always been science certified. Originally, I only planned to teach a few years. Like many new teachers, I found it a struggle in the beginning. I was determined not to leave
113 until I felt like I had mastered at least some of the skills necessary to be considered a
“good” teacher. By the time I felt like that, I really liked what I was doing, and didn’t want to leave.
During my career with Columbus City, I have taught career-technical as well as traditional science courses. I have worked in 2 different high schools, 2 different career centers, and have served the district as a full time mentor to new teachers. I have taught in one of the lowest performing high schools as well as one of the highest performing high schools in our district. I am currently teaching a new biotechnology career-technical program. For me, one of the biggest advantages of working in an urban district is the wide range of opportunities it provides to educators. I have been able to have vastly varied experiences without having to switch districts and lose seniority. Project ASPIRE is an excellent example of one of these experiences.
I was involved with Project ASPIRE from the very beginning. I was at a stage in my teaching where I was becoming more involved with professional activities beyond my classroom. Colleagues had approached me about becoming department chair in the school I was serving at the time. However, when I read about the opportunities associated with Project ASPIRE, I knew it sounded much more appealing to me than the many managerial tasks connected to being a department chair. My favorite part of teaching is in developing and delivering innovative lessons; this was the part of the description that attracted me to the program. I have always been interested in improving my craft, so it was an easy decision to apply to join the program.
As part of the ASPIRE project, I was involved in both the mentoring as well as the curriculum development portions of the mission. I enjoyed working with the student
114 teachers. They have a refreshing enthusiasm, and it was a treat to have someone to reflect with on a daily basis. I can also say that working as part of the ICDT team was a career highlight. I had no idea how much it would help not only my students, but help me stretch and try strategies that were definitely out of my comfort zone.
Becky. I am a 20-year veteran of Columbus City Schools. Although I spent several years of an interlude in the suburbs, my heart and passion have always belonged to the vibrant students of Columbus City Schools. Throughout these years, I have been asked “what do you teach?’” My response has always been, and will always be,
“children.” Who I teach is my core. Mathematics is a vast and fascinating topic that students and I daily explore. The students and I co-create a community of learners where mathematics and life weave together.
The promise of developing and implementing new curriculum served as the catalyst for my interest in the ASPIRE project. I served for two years as a mentor teacher and three years on the Innovative Curriculum and Design Team. The work with the
ICDT has had the greatest impact on student learning than any practice I have ever incorporated into my learning communities. The depth of relationship-building between students and between students and teachers which resulted from the powerful, relevant, integrated art and mathematics work led to the most significant gain in student understanding of abstract mathematics I have ever encountered. With this said, the paradigm shift that I myself experienced was profound. My energy and efficacy soared.
The ICDT was a group endeavor by passionate educators. We set out to design meaningful curriculum for the students we love. Yet, our practices evolved just as much as our students’ learning.
115 Teresa. What led me to teaching? . . . There were no teachers in my family. I am the granddaughter of uneducated immigrants. The chalkboard in my grandmother’s darkened basement was the location of my first classroom. My younger siblings were my first pupils, and my love of teaching them was born there in the basement and grew year after year until at last the dream was fulfilled. . . Actually, that story isn’t true. I wish it had happened like that for me, but there was no innate calling that told me I was destined to teach!
I went through my teenage years devouring National Geographic magazines (the annual Christmas gift from friends of my parents who wisely purchased that for a family of 8 children – it was a true luxury in our non-luxurious lives)! I learned about places and people in far off countries and dreamed of being a National Geographic journalist and photographer. That dream was buried, though, when my father told me that women become teachers or nurses, because of family obligations. In fairness to my father, he never knew of my National Geographic dreams. I was silent in an effort to please him.
I wasn’t in the generation that won women’s rights. Rather, I was the generation that carved out what it could look like to have them. My sister, 13 years my junior, would become a doctor – the same father encouraging her to reach for her (perhaps his) dreams.
She had the freedom to explore career options in a way that I didn’t. Those 13 years represented a complete change in the attitude of what working outside the house for women looked like.
As for me, this is my twenty-fifth year of teaching, and I currently teach sixth- grade science. I have a Bachelor of Science degree in Education and a Master of Science degree in curriculum, instruction and assessment. I am also certified as a State of Ohio
116 Master Teacher, and I am National Board certified. As a middle school science teacher, I have a thirst for finding new, creative and outside-the- box lessons. I am constantly juggling – lesson plans, equipment, reading about the latest in science and the latest in education, designing, trying, building relationships, working with student teachers (some people think of this as “time off” – it’s actually a lot more work than being by yourself in the classroom), being a union rep, expanding my own professional development, teaching, teaching, teaching (the core of what I do) and the list goes on. All this while also trying to balance my home life. I don’t really have a neatly packaged philosophy of teaching, but if forced to, I would say in as few words as possible that my teaching philosophy is “be passionate!!!” I agreed to be part of Kerry’s dissertation study, because
I think that when you open your practice for examination, you become better. While it might feel uncomfortable because you make yourself vulnerable to criticism, it is critical for personal and professional growth. So, I stepped outside the box (and perhaps back in a few times) knowing that no matter where it led, it would ultimately lead to a better practice…. Teaching really is an art!!!
Data Collection
The data for this longitudinal dissertation study (2009-2015) were collected over the entirety of the project. As is consistent with ethnographic methods (Bloomaert & Jie,
2010), the data include a range of materials gathered in the interest of developing a wide and deep understanding of the ICDT context. It should be noted that documentation I obtained prior to receiving official co-investigator status on the project’s IRB but in my role as project director, serve as historical artifacts. Those material artifacts include emails among the teachers and me, and written reflections (by them and by me), on the 117 purpose and role of our collaborative work, which we used when explaining our work to a public audience. Those material artifacts also include photographs of participants at work on the arts-integrated endeavor (see, e.g., figures 9-12, above), and, later, field notes, which usually took the form of journal entries and contain many of my emerging questions, concerns and feelings (Spradley, 1980).
In addition to the above artifacts, I officially (with IRB approval) collected audio data in three ways. First, I recorded our whole group and disciplinary subgroup meetings in years 3 and 4. I also collected recordings of five different focus groups, which were held by the entire Project ASPIRE research team at the end of the project’s fifth year. The focus group sessions involved group discussions and opportunities for individual participants’ written commentary and feedback. The discussions were both audio and videotaped, and I took written notes and collected any supplemental written documentation generated during the session. These materials were shared with all members of the research team, including the project’s Principal Investigator and other university and school district key research personnel. The creation of redundant data was part of the team’s effort to minimize inadvertent data collection errors and loss, as well as to ensure its accuracy and trustworthiness (Glesne & Peshkin, 1992).
Of the 40 total participants across the six years, 20 attended a focus group session specifically about the ICDT during the ICDT’s third year. As the lead researcher of the
ICDT research strand for the project, I facilitated the session, using a series of questions I had created to align with my overall research agenda for the ICDT. (See Appendix A.) Of the attendees, 17 were current Year 5 participants, and three were group members from
118 previous years who had continued to express interest in arts integration and the ICDT.
(See table 9 for a summary of the ICDT focus group participants.)
Table 9. Year 4 ICDT Focus Group Participation Participant Subject Area Taught Grade Level Years in ICDT
1 Mathematics 9-12 1 2 Mathematics 7 1 3 Mathematics 7 1 4 French 9-12 3 5 Chinese 9-12 1 6 Science 9-12 2 7 Science (Career Tech/Landscape) 11-12 3 8 Science 6 2 9 Inclusion (All Content Areas) 6 2 10 Physical Science 9 3 11 Science 7 1 12 Chinese 6-8 1 13 Spanish 9-12 1 14 Spanish 9-12 1 15 Spanish 9-12 2 16 Science (Career Tech/BioScience) 11-12 3 17 Science 6 1 18 Spanish 6-8 1 19 Mathematics 9-12 3 20 Mathematics 9-12 1
The four additional focus groups were dedicated to the project’s other research strands: pre-service apprenticeship through co-planning and co-teaching with mentors, cognitive coaching, an Urban Teaching Seminar based on equity, diversity and social justice, instructional technology, and sustainability. Therefore, members of the team who were most familiar with those strands facilitated their corresponding focus group sessions. I provided ICDT/art-related questions to each of the facilitators in order to 119 capture any additional relevant information that might be shared in those contexts. After completion of the four focus group sessions, the data were uploaded to a secure common online repository. Then, all research team members transcribed assigned portions of the recordings and posted their completed portions for assembly into the comprehensive transcript of each session, which was then accessible to all research team members.
Finally, I used a semi-structured interview process to generate current narratives with this study’s four subcases: Caren, Pam, Becky and Teresa. Those interviews probed the nature of the four participants’ experiences making art and teaching through art in the context of the ICDT. As my data analysis progressed, I returned several times to each of the four participants to ask follow-up questions.
Data Analysis
Thorne (2000) explained that ethnographic analysis involves iterative processes of sifting through, culling and sorting copious bits of data in order to detect and interpret thematic categories, identify inconsistencies, and generate conclusions about the culture or group of individuals being studied. However, prior to beginning theme discovery, an additional, and often unexamined, step in the data analysis phase must be undertaken.
This initial step is the transcription of audio and/or video recordings (Mishler, 1991;
Green, Franquiz & Dixon, 1997).
Transcription. From a constructivist standpoint, this process is not viewed as a neutral, mechanical endeavor, but rather a central research practice, which has been described as “a process of testing, clarifying, and deepening our understanding of what is happening in the discourse” (Mishler, 1991, p. 277). The transcript is a representation of an event through which the transcriber actually constructs data (Green et al., 1997). As 120 such, transcription is a political act, and a transcript is a record of that act. By choosing a traditional linear transcript, for example, the researcher makes examining the dynamic, fluid nature of conversation inaccessible to readers and in so doing, positions herself as an authoritative with sole access to contextual information not available through the transcript itself (Green et al., 1997).
My commitment to troubling inequitable power dynamics and moving purposively toward critical consciousness requires me to explain why, therefore, I chose to represent the conversational encounters under study using a traditional linear format.
Firstly, I had more than 50 hours of recordings and therefore decided to have some of the audio files transcribed by a professional transcription service. Such services are removed from the original context and result in transcripts that are presented in a simple linear format. Secondly, the Project ASPIRE research team also followed the linear process when team members collaboratively transcribed the focus group recordings. For the sake of consistency between all of the transcriptions, I retained the linear format when I undertook transcription myself. Finally, as the person most familiar with all of the dimensions of the ICDT and its context, I believed I could best represent and interpret the collaborative conversations, all of which I was a part. Because of these factors, when I read the linear transcriptions, whether they were transcribed by someone else or by me, I was able to understand the contextual meanings and nuances in order to appropriately code the data. Once transcriptions were completed, I analyzed all of the data in an iterative process involving five main activities: (1) theme discovery; (2) categorization and description of core and peripheral themes; (3) creation of theme hierarchies; (4) applying themes to chunks of text; and (5) linking the themes to theory (Bernard & Ryan,
121 2010).
Theme discovery: Initial coding. I began my analysis by examining all of the data and creating an inventory of ideas (domains) that I noticed based on literal content.
To do this, I used an inductive, open coding approach that began with my noting words or expressions that occurred frequently throughout the texts. This, according to D'Andrade
(1995), is a way to directly discern what is important to participants and how they make sense of phenomena. He argued, "perhaps the simplest and most direct indication of schematic organization in naturalistic discourse is the repetition of associative linkages"
(p. 294). I paid particular attention to in vivo codes (Strauss, 1987; Strauss & Corbin,
1990), although given my extensive familiarity with the ICDT and its context, it was unusual for me to find any terms that were unfamiliar or used in unfamiliar ways
(Bernard & Ryan, 2010). Instead, following Patton (1990), I attempted to identify categories based on words and phrases that had become commonplace within the ICDT and that I, therefore, knew well. My emic knowledge allowed me to pinpoint those instances of insider talk, which I knew to be specific to our group culture.
Next, I attempted to move beyond the inventory stage to interpretation. Therefore,
I began looking for cultural themes—both tacit and explicit—that seemed to connect the ideas I had initially perceived (Spradley, 1980). This step was critical, because, as
Spradley (1980) argued, themes are the cognitive principles that represent the beliefs and common understandings of study participants. Related to this, I knew from my ongoing observations that one of the primary strategies the group had come to develop in their interdisciplinary conversations was the use of analogies and metaphors (Dixon, Rhoades,
Barton & Stroot, in review). Therefore, I followed the recommendation of schema
122 analysts (D’Andrade, 1995; Quinn & Strauss, 1997) and identified repeated metaphors, similes and analogies (both explicit and implicit) to deduce the underlying principles and patterns, which find their expression in metaphorical language (Bernard & Ryan, 2010). I also used some a priori themes related to the theoretical ideas comprising my conceptual framework (community, collaboration, disciplines, design, etc.) And, finally, I used the constant comparative method (Charmaz, 2001; Glaser, 1978; Glaser & Strauss, 1967;
Strauss, 1987) to determine what concepts should be included in the inventory and how those concepts were the same or different from others I had already discerned. Once I completed the constant comparative approach, I realized that I was not finding any new themes and, therefore, determined that I had reached saturation. This allowed me to move to my next stage of analysis.
Organization of themes. The next step in my analysis involved organizing the themes I had discovered into a coherent structure. To do this, I followed Morcom’s
(2014) lead and created super categories using Rogoff’s (1995) three-plane model for the social construction of knowledge. As mentioned in Chapter 2, those planes consist of three interconnected realms (community, interpersonal and personal) in which learning occurs (Rogoff, 1995). Rather than foregrounding any particular plane at this point in the analysis, I allowed the data to speak for themselves and simply organized all of the emergent themes into the three categories. Because Rogoff (1995) used the metaphor of apprenticeship as a model for activities that take place within the community plane, I categorized any themes related to cultural institutions or the “doing” of cultural practices—including those that involved participants’ thoughts about being or not being an expert in a practice—within this first realm. Then, because the concept of “guided
123 participation” (Rogoff, 1995) provides a way of thinking about how more and less expert individuals interact with each other in culturally sanctioned activities, I organized all themes related to interpersonal relationships and activities into the second plane. Finally,
I used the third plane of participatory appropriation (Rogoff, 1995) to designate any themes related to how individuals had changed through their involvement with the ICDT.
Any themes that did not seem to fit within the three planes were categorized into a
“miscellaneous” category.
Testing and theorizing. Once I finished organizing the themes into the four super categories, I began a process of testing those that seemed most important. Deciding which to test involved a good deal of reflexivity. I consciously attempt to let the data speak for itself by testing themes that were explicitly and implicitly important to participants. I also tested those that I, as both participant and observer, believed to be significant. Therefore, I returned to the data and applied the prioritized themes to further assess their applicability. Then, I notated all of my documents with my emerging ideas about how the themes related to one another, indicating which parts of the texts contained the most salient quotes. Finally, I wrote numerous memos, some in outline form, to connect the patterns and relationships to theory.
Limitations
I seek to generate a formal, empirically based theory about the integration of art by STEM teachers, which can inform the larger—and very young—debate about what
STEM-Art integration is and how to enact it in substantive, rigorous ways that meet the needs of diverse learners. In this, I am aware of the need for me to have “theoretical sensitivity” to the ideas that characterize the context in which the theory is developed 124 (Urquart et al. 2010, p. 360). This means that I must attend to the multiple epistemological perspectives within the project’s context. I have not done that methodologically, however. Instead, I have chosen to approach this study with a constructivist, post-structuralist stance that is reflective of arts-based ways of knowing and ethnography. That approach does not align tightly with the predominantly positivist and post-positivist traditions of the STEM domains. To achieve that sort of methodological alignment, I would have perhaps chosen a mixed methods approach, which would incorporate quantitative techniques. Quantitative techniques would have allowed me to make theory-based hypotheses about the nature of the ICDT experience, then test the hypotheses through deductive reasoning based on the scientific method.
With these techniques, my results would be more easily generalizable to larger and wider populations. Despite these limitations, I chose to adopt an ethnographic approach, which
I found to be more appropriate to the study’s context.
Ethnography has allowed me to paint a detailed picture of a particular long-term lived experience from an insider’s perspective. Yet as my study participants often reminded me, our experience was singular and would be difficult, if not impossible, to replicate. A unique set of circumstances brought together a unique group of people to create and sustain a unique Community of Practice.
Another typical limitation of the ethnographic approach impacts this study: friendship. The participants on this project have become both my colleagues and dear, trusted friends. While the relationships have afforded me a special opportunity to access their ideas, classrooms, students and personal lives, it is quite possible that our friendships would prevent them from expressing criticisms of our joint work in order to
125 spare my feelings. In addition, they were deeply committed to the mission we undertook and have all become staunch arts and arts-integration advocates. They are all well aware of the potential impact their voices could have on future research and policy pertaining to the arts in schooling. This means that in focus groups and interviews they might sometimes seize the opportunity to advocate for, rather than reflect on, our work. I have tried to be attentive to these dimensions and limitations of the project and at the same time, recognize that the commitments and biases of the participants reflect underlying issues that I am hoping to capture in this study.
126
Chapter 4:
Collaborative Learning at the Frontier of New Knowledge
Trowler, Saunders and Bamber (2012) argued that people are carriers of practice.
Therefore, when individuals join together in clusters (communities) of practice, their histories, along with the histories of every other community member, inform the group’s shared practices. Those practices can, therefore, be understood as the culturally determined outcome of a negotiated process. Jackson (2002) referred to this kind of outcome as a cultural contract. Individuals, he explained, continually shape their identities in relation to that contract. Thus, identities can be conceptualized as the projection of cultural knowledge and values, or, as Powell (2005) argued, as unstable nexus of struggle between heterogeneity and homogeneity. He further described these nexus as “sutures that are made within the discourses of history and culture” (p. 48).
Thus, the ways in which those discourses are expressed, interpreted, and sutured together to shape an individual’s identity depend on his or her situatedness in relation to the discourses and other members of that particular Community of Practice (see also Lave &
Wenger, 1991). Hence, individual identities, like the Communities of Practice to which people belong, can be understood as heterogeneous “contact zones” (Pratt, 1991) that are continually shaped by non-neutral forces.
127 From Roles to Typologies: Interdisciplinary Concept Formation
In this chapter, I present my analysis of the data associated with the four research participants—Caren, Pam, Becky and Teresa—using the perspective that participants’ identities and practices are contact zones where discourses of history and culture meet.
The data indicated that each of the participants took up and performed specific roles that advanced the objectives of the ICDT, sustained the Community of Practice and, ultimately, contributed to the transformation of their teaching practices. Therefore, in order to understand these phenomena, my analysis focuses on each of the four participant roles I identified: scouting, cartography, translating and homesteading.3 Analyzing these roles allows me to address my research questions pertaining to why, how and to what degree ICDT participants took up STEM-Art integration. Furthermore, understanding each participant’s experience in relation to the primary role they performed in the group sheds light on specific qualities that resulted in their enduring commitment to arts integration. One possible outcome of this approach is a typology of identities, which helps to answer my primary research question of how teachers at the secondary level can adopt arts-integrated approaches in their mathematics and science teaching practices. By understanding some of the key similarities and differences within any such set of typologies, this dissertation study has the potential to support the development and sustenance of effective interdisciplinary Communities of Practice.
Typologies are organized systems of types, and by definition, any typology represents an attempt to classify something (Bositis, 1988; Collier, LaPorte & Seawright,
3 Readers might immediately note the vestiges of colonialism in these names; I discuss this problematic issue throughout this chapter and again in Chapter 5. 128 2012). Within social science, typologies—including the classification of people into roles—are often used in quantitative research, particularly as a tool for measurement
(e.g., Krasner, 1977; Carmines & Stimson 1980; Ansell & Fish 1999). Collier et al.
(2012) argued that both quantitative and qualitative research can benefit from typologies that provide new ways of thinking about underlying dimensions of phenomena. One of the most powerful ways this can be actualized is through the use of typologies in concept formation. They explained that thinking through typologies “productively organizes our thinking as we work with established concepts and seek to create new ones” (p. 222).
Using typologies for concept formation can be risky, however. The act of assigning a role to an individual could be interpreted as an act of confinement. However, the potential harm to an individual of role assignment is variable and depends on multiple factors, including the socioeconomic status of the person to whom a role is assigned and the purpose of the assignment. For example, when roles impose identities on marginalized individuals or groups of individuals in the form of stereotypes, they become tools of dehumanization. Shelby (1999) explained, “to stereotype is to dehumanize; to make ridiculous; to ignore history, politics, economics and culture . . . [I]t serve[s] to dismiss legitimate complaints about discrimination and to deflect potentially disturbing questions about who has money and power, who doesn’t, and why” (p. 158). The role assignment I perform within my analysis is of a very particular nature—that is, it represents a form of qualitative modeling with roots in visual analysis. Briggs (2007) explained the usefulness of this methodological tool and approach by saying that such,
“models offer a simplification of reality by showing relationships between key variables, factors or phenomena. This process of reduction may be undertaken, however, in order to
129 amplify or enlarge understanding” (p. 590). However, she clarified the difference between the use of modeling in quantitative and qualitative analyses, which is based on very different epistemological assumptions. According to Briggs, “in positivist research, the use of models would be part of a search for definitive truths, based upon verifiable facts; a successfully constructed model would present current understanding of those truths” (p. 590). She continued:
Researchers adopting an interpretivist stance—that there are no absolute truths to be found, but that people experience and construe reality individually and subjectively—would use models to depict the researcher’s understanding of the complexity of the phenomenon studied . . . the knowledge constructed in this way can be used developmentally, as a tool for understanding and an agent for change. (pp. 590-91)
According to this perspective, a model situated within a positivist paradigm that assigns a role to an individual (and, therefore to groups comprised of individuals meeting the role’s criteria) would essentialize that person into a unified, stable identity (Jacqui &
Mohanty, 1997). This dissertation can avoid such essentialization, because it is not situated within a positivist paradigm, but rather within the interpretivist domain. An interpretivist worldview conceptualizes reality as being constituted of multiple, socially determined mental constructions (Guba & Lincoln, 1994). As such, identity is neither one-dimensional nor pre-determined, but rather multifarious and relative. Using an interpretivist approach to role assignment in this analysis thus has the potential to not only support theory development as it pertains to interdisciplinary Communities of
Practice, but to also fit within (rather than undermine) the critical agenda of my dissertation study.
130
The Politics of Naming
Language is also a place of struggle ... the oppressed struggle in language to recover ourselves, to reconcile, to reunite, to renew. (hooks 1989, p. 49)
Assigning names to the participants’ roles is an inherent part of the modeling process, and that processes is not neutral. Rather, it is an act of communication that
“requires entering into and utilizing a language that pre-exists for the speaker [writer]”
(Obourne 2005, p. 220). That pre-existing language is derived from a discourse community to which the speaker/writer belongs. It is only comprehensible to an audience if the audience holds membership in that discourse community (Obourne, 2005).
Therefore, in the case of the standard academic English discourse I draw on to write this dissertation study, my linguistic choices are a performance of my identity. Hence, the words I choose to describe my research participants cannot be separated from my own socio-political situatedness in relation to them (or to the readers of this text and the discourse community as a whole).
hooks’ (1989) assertion that “language is a place of struggle” (p. 49) underscores the fact that members of discourse communities are not all equally situated in relation to one another. Instead, language establishes and reveals power relations, and in the case of dominant discourse, it produces, secures, and reifies social stratification (Mane, 2012).
That process can be explicit, but it also often takes less obvious forms that, when interrogated, indicate an underlying hegemonic epistemology. Because I am a white woman of European descent, the words I employ contain the sediments of my colonizing ancestors and serve as a linguistic representation of my privileged status within an unjust
131 social structure. Moreover, this representation is not just a historical vestige, but also, as critical whiteness scholars have argued, an enduring instrument of oppression (e.g.,
Carrillo Rowe 2000; Mills 2008; Shome, 2000). As Mane (2012) explained, whiteness is a discursive formation that resists interrogation through “ever-adapting rhetorical strategies and structures of thought that reproduce whiteness, primarily undercover, as a naturalized and unspoken set of relations” (p. 73). She argued that in its staunch refusal to acknowledge itself, whiteness can be distinguished by its “slipperiness” (p. 74), or, in other words, by its ability to escape detection. Thus, exposing and naming whiteness so that it can be disrupted is a fundamental counterhegemonic tool in the fight for equity and justice (McLaren et al., 2001).
Slippery White Metaphors
In my analysis, I use four primary metaphors to illuminate how each of my dissertation study participants made sense of their ICDT STEM-Art experiences.
Understanding STEM-Art sense making in a manner tied to how identity is performed acknowledges the dynamic, variable, and incomplete nature of reality. This, in turn, allows me to write against normative, uni-dimensional templates for STEM-Art integration while building theory about how interdisciplinarity can be effectively enacted by a wide range of individuals, groups, and organizations. Therefore, I name the roles participants performed using metaphors, which create a rich picture of the ICDT phenomenon. This approach simultaneously achieves the aims of modeling as a research methodology and facilitates the thick descriptions that are so fundamental to my ethnographic inquiry into the nature of STEM-Art Communities of Practice (Geertz,
1973).
132 However, each of the names associated with the participant’s roles are inextricably tied to the history of the American frontier, and that history is one of ongoing injustice, which is based on systemic racist violence and white Eurocentric privilege.
Therefore, in the section below, I discuss how I use the terms—scouting, interpreting, map-making and homesteading—and strive to avoid a rhetoric of supremacy that pretends to be innocuous (Mane, 2012). I draw on standpoint theory (Haraway, 1988;
Hartsock, 1983; Hill Collins, 1990) to argue that as a white woman, the range of anti- racist, critical strategies available to me when using empire-related metaphors is extremely small. I cannot use these metaphors and claim to assign them a new, anti-racist meaning through my analysis without risking the propagation of yet another form of slippery whiteness. As Lorde (1984) argued, “for the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change” (p. 110). In fact, according to Lorde,
Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place and time. I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives here. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices. (p. 110)
The question then becomes, how am I to draw on the discourses that I know and that are available to me as a white person, to name the concepts that so clearly emerged from the data sets pertaining to my research participants (all of whom are also white women) in a manner that advances, rather than undermines, justice, equity, diversity and humanity?
Challenging Lorde (1984), Needham (2000) suggests that resistance can indeed
133 emanate from the practices and tools of dominance to mount counterhegemonic attacks.
While agreeing with Said (1985) that there is a qualitative difference between writing that
“grows out of direct involvement in struggle “ and that which “has a highly mediated and indirect relationship within a given struggle” (p. 21), Needham argued that writers such as Salman Rushdie, Michelle Cliff, and C. L. R. James, have effectively appropriated colonialist codes to undermine the enduring power and authority of dominant culture.
However, one of the many differences between these examples and me is the fact that they are members of the post-colonial diaspora, whereas I am not. On this basis alone, there is ample justification to criticize any attempt I might make to use empire metaphors as a counterhegemonic tool. In my analysis within this chapter and, similarly in chapter 5,
I am mindful of all of these perspectives as I offer for consideration a hybrid strategy of resistance. That strategy simultaneously names the whiteness (and associated history of colonizing violence) in my choice of slippery metaphors, leverages the power of those metaphors to describe the indisputable fact that my participants were moving through new conceptual territory, and focuses attention on how they enacted this movement. It is, in fact, the “how” of the interdisciplinary boundary crossing that I seek to understand and that contributes more broadly to acts of moving across the spaces and places of all manner of difference. Framed in this manner, the metaphors are, in fact, necessary to resistance as I understand it, because they place, hopefully, my readers and me into a space of productive unease against which my ideas should be judged (Spivak 1989;
Needham, 2000; Rege, 2001).
Interdisciplinarity and a History of Frontier Metaphors.
Since Becher and Trowler (1989/2001) first used the term “tribes” to describe
134 academic cultures and the term “territories” to describe disciplines, the two metaphors have become a classic meme for understanding the unique epistemic and methodological characteristics of any given field of study. The colonist history embedded in these metaphors notwithstanding, they are part of a methodological tradition that draws on metaphors for elucidating concepts and building theory in a wide range of research endeavors. As such, they appear frequently in both quantitative and qualitative social science analyses. As linguistic devices, they have a unique capacity to describe complex behavior patterns in one domain using terms (usually easier and more immediately comprehensible) from another (Celentano & Pittarello, 2012).
In social science and beyond, metaphorical speech reflects the history of the groups who use it. As Gramsci (1971) argued, “[t]he whole of language is a continuous process of metaphor, and the history of semantics is an aspect of the history of culture; language is at the same time a living thing and a museum of fossils of life and civilizations” (p. 450). For this reason, the discourse community of Western academia contains the fossils of Eurocentric colonialist violence, as well the living vestiges of enduring subaltern oppression. Those fossils are sedimented within the metaphors that are often used to explain the world, with some of the fossils being more obvious than others.
For example, in research pertaining to fields of knowledge, geography-based metaphors are common, and, like the tribes and territories analogies, carry connotations of colonialism and violence.
Kuhn (1996) offered a general explanation for the use of such metaphors to describe fields of knowledge when he pointed out that “space is fundamental to perception and cognition because it provides a common ground for our senses as well as
135 our actions . . . space is not just any domain of experience, but the most important one, and as such uniquely qualified as a metaphor source” (p. 3). In a critical examination of how literary metaphors function as discursive supports of British imperial culture, Birk and Neumann (2006) explained that Empire-based metaphors not only describe the
Empire, but also actually construct and perpetuate it. This perspective is supported by critical whiteness studies, which have argued that whiteness as a historically constructed identity is simultaneously a material structural property, a structuring ideology, a discursive formation and an epistemology (Du Bois, 1920; Morrison, 1992; Frankenburg,
1993; Bonilla-Silva & Forman, 2000; Mane, 2012). Together, these components of whiteness advance a colonial discourse, creating and reifying a “culture of memory”
(Birk & Neumann, 2006, p. 65) that functions broadly in the service of hegemonic power structures. Mane (2012) described how the “slipperiness of whiteness” (p. 74) involves its ability to escape detection and deflect scrutiny, both of which make interrogation and disruption of privilege particularly challenging. Further, in the context of third-wave feminism, Mane (2012) explored how sequential waves of progressive agendas have consistently failed to fully reconceptualize, and, therefore, transform the dominant
Eurocentric, white, middle-class, male knowledge base.
In situating this study under the socio-cultural umbrella and conceptualizing disciplinary and interdisciplinary groups as communities operating in a field defined by their shared practices, I am not far removed from Becher and Trowler’s (1989/2001)
“tribes and territories” meme. Moreover, the ICDT experience—an exploratory endeavor created to push teachers and teacher educators into new territories of praxis—is naturally suited to geography- and exploration-related analogies. Rothaermel (2001), in fact,
136 explicitly defined exploration as “the pursuit of new knowledge, of things that might come to be known” (p. 689). Therefore, it is with critical consciousness and caution that
I have chosen to use metaphors pertaining to the exploration of the American frontier, all of which contain the sedimented vestiges of colonialism and conquest, to explain the
ICDT experience. While the metaphors cannot be separated from their history, I employ them in the interest of renegotiating their meaning (Iseke-Barnes, 2004). In this way, I use the metaphors in an attempt to abrogate their historical purpose and to challenge their normative meanings (Ashcroft, Griffiths & Tiffin, 1989). Therefore, I offer the metaphors of scouting, cartography, translating/interpreting, and homsteading as a dialectical starting point that contributes productively to justice-oriented struggles over theorizing fields of knowledge in new ways. In so doing, I heed Mane’s (2012) warning that the struggle against hegemony all-too-frequently disappears in praxis when troubling theoretical issues are left perpetually unresolved. In Chapter 5, I present a theoretical framework that grows from this analysis (including my use of the frontier metaphors), and is intended to contribute to larger dialogues seeking to eradicate injustice and inequity in all of its forms.
Theme 1: Scouting (Featuring Caren)
The fact that I’ve been changed means I don’t fit in this system anymore. I need to be in a place that breathes, is alive (Caren, Group Discussion, 2013).
In alignment with sociocultural theory (Vygotsky, 1930-34/1978; Wertsch, 1991;
Herne, 2006; Moll, 2014), any critical examination of a group’s defining activities requires understanding the cultural space in which those activities take place. In the case
137 of interdisciplinarity, that space concerns two or more individual disciplines as well as the intersections between them. The ICDT’s space was defined by the ideologically- bound, disciplinary activities of mathematics, science, world language and art, and by the intersection of art with the other disciplines. Because the group members were newcomers to the discipline of art and to the practice of arts integration, it would be somewhat natural to think of these new territories as uncharted. However, as is the case with 19th-century explorations of the American West by individuals of European descent, conceptualizing art and arts-integrated interdisciplinarity as an unoccupied space-for-the- taking would reinforce a hegemonic notion of the Frontier and serve as a prime example of the slipperiness of whiteness. However, Communities of Practice theory (Lave &
Wenger, 1991; Kim & Merriam, 2010; Smolka et al., 1985) helps explain how territories of knowledge can simultaneously be unknown and occupied.
Communities of Practice are organic entities whose boundaries shift and change as members share ideas and learn from one another. Because individuals are multiply situated and belong simultaneously to various Communities of Practice, the knowledge shared in one Community impacts others in a mutually inflecting, dynamic relationship
(Woods & Jeffrey, 2002). Apprenticeship theory explains how newcomers to an existing
Community move from the unknown at the community’s periphery to the center, under the tutelage of experts. Yet when all members are newcomers because a new Community is being formed (as in the case of the ICDT), there are no experts to guide the group.
Instead, the Community must be formed through experimentation and exploration into that which is unknown to all members. And, in place of the expert, someone must be willing to undertake initial forays into the unknown territory in order to discern its
138 landscape on behalf of the group. This requires a particular set of knowledge and skills that ensure the continued existence of the nascent group. In an actual frontier setting, wilderness survival involves a deep understanding of the environment, and the requisite survival skills involve activities such as finding and building shelter, obtaining food, scouting new areas, and more. In the context of the ICDT, Caren repeatedly demonstrated her proclivity for one such leadership activity. That activity was scouting.
In the context of hegemonic accounts of American history, scouting has often been presented as part of a romanticized picture of Frontier life. It is a picture that ignores the exploitation of indigenous people whose knowledge of the land—their home for thousands of years—was used by pioneers from Europe (or of European descent )and the expanding power of the United States Government to satisfy their hunger for territorial acquisition. Non-natives with similar wilderness skills also engaged in scouting activities, sometimes for independent purposes, yet often as part of official military efforts. In these latter cases, scouts performed primarily reconnaissance activities, entering the territory of
Others and taking information that would aid Western colonial conquest. Such scouting was institutionalized through the United States Army in divisions such as the United
States Calvary and the U.S. Corps of Topographical Engineers (Goetzmann, 1959/1991).
In the context of this study, Caren did not perform scouting activities with the intent to colonize the territory of others. To do so would have meant claiming interdisciplinarity as the sole property of the ICDT or operating as if the content, methods, epistemological and ontological characteristics of her discipline should somehow be prioritized over those of the other disciplines. It would also mean ignoring, appropriating or exploiting the special qualities of the other disciplines. To the contrary, Caren often showed that she respected
139 and valued disciplinary differences, attempting to learn from others in order to better serve her students. In this regard, she often emphasized the importance of her own learning in relation to her teaching practice. Therefore, as she engaged in the core scouting activity of wayfinding within the art and arts-integration territories, she engaged in counterhegemonic—rather than hegemonic—disciplinary practices.
Wayfinding. Wayfinding is a term commonly used in fields such as architecture, urban planning, information design and cognitive psychology. The term is used to indicate the ability of an individual to move logically through space. Allen (1999) explained that there are three primary types of wayfinding tasks: (1) those that involve traveling between two known locations on a familiar route (such as a daily commute); (2) those that involve exploratory travel into unknown territory with the primary goal of gaining knowledge of the new surroundings or environment; and (3) those that involve a quest (i.e., traveling from a place of familiarity to a destination that one knows of but has never visited). The ICDT endeavor involved finding new, previously unknown pathways to catalyze and guide student learning. Therefore, the first wayfinding type is not directly applicable to this discussion. However, the second type was central to actualizing the
ICDT mission, as participants were required to venture from the familiarity of their
“home” disciplines to explore both the “foreign” discipline of art and the unknown realm of arts-integrated interdisciplinarity. The third form of wayfinding (the “quest”) was a natural outcome of being charged with a mission by Project ASPIRE: to reach beyond customary classroom practice, and to not only explore, but also develop new pedagogical methods that could help change how future teachers are prepared.
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Into the unknown. Allen (1999) characterized this second type of wayfinding task as an exploration-based “foraging for spatial information” (p. 554). The goal of this sort of activity is not only to find a new place, but also to discover pathways that link it to other locations. In this sense, any exploration includes the assumption that the wayfinder will return eventually to the point of origin (or, at least, to some familiar place), bringing information about the newly discovered places and pathways back to his/her companions
(Allen, 1999).
Caren manifested her proclivity for wayfinding-in-the-unknown many times and in many different ways during the ICDT’s five-year history. One typical example of this occurred at the end of our third year of collaboration. Throughout that school year (2012-
2013), she and I had undertaken a filmmaking project with a professional independent filmmaker and an interest group of five to seven students who joined us several times a week in Caren’s classroom during their lunchtime. As we neared the end of the school year, the project was to be featured at a meeting of district administrators. One of my colleagues (the co-founder and co-director of my arts education nonprofit organization) became focused on the potential business dimensions of the film and wanted me to meet with the superintendent to propose an agreement that would give ownership of the film rights to our organization. It was a proposal with which I disagreed; therefore, Caren and
I brainstormed ways for me to address this issue. The transcript from our conversation is filled with her laying out a clear strategy with distinct times, places and events that serve as the landmarks and pivot points to navigate complicated territory. For example, she asserted, “The seed for growing the film project has been planted. It’s not ready to be
141 harvested yet.” With this statement, Caren mapped out a new space for thinking about the ownership of ideas and intellectual property rights, providing a way for me to both see and explain to my colleague the process through which our unconventional school-based initiative might gain traction with the administration. In this, she drew on her own experiences in the district and in her building to show me (and my colleague) a potential pathway. In so doing, she prevented us as outsiders from making strategic errors from which the project might be unable to recover. She explained the conditions necessary for the “seed” to reach the harvest stage:
[The principal] has stepped up and gone the extra mile to get this movie, the kids’ work and the school into this place of public light. It’s an issue of trust. It has to start at the site, with the principal, and move up through the chain of command. If that bridge with the principal gets burned and her power is stolen, then we get burned on all fronts.
Here, Caren provided further direction, pointing out the significant landmarks of that we had already passed. Then, she provided contextual information about the organizational setting by explaining the markers ahead that we could anticipate crossing. While the actual process of advancing a film project within the district was new, and therefore unknown, to her, she was able to draw on her prior encounters with the district’s chain of command in order to guide our joint endeavor.
In another statement from the same meeting transcript, Caren communicated the fundamental ideological perspective that seemed to guide all of her wayfinding activities.
She explained to me:
This is an unfolding process. It’s a tender place of relationship building. Things have to be given time so that later the other pieces [at the district level] can be formed.
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With this assertion, Caren articulated her belief that in any kind of change process, there exists a relational aspect, which ultimately determines if an endeavor succeeds or fails.
By arguing that that this aspect must be treated with the upmost care, she showcased the philosophical underpinnings of her particular form of wayfinding. In other words, Caren demonstrated an unwavering dedication to authentic collaboration, which benefits all who are involved in a joint effort. In this way, she revealed the humanizing role she repeatedly played in the formation of the ICDT Community of Practice, steering it toward enacting interdisciplinarity as a project in humanization (Kinloch & San Pedro, 2013).
Perhaps most emblematic of Caren’s skills as a humanizing, interdisciplinary wayfinder was the gentle admonishment she offered to my colleague, which drew directly on an orienteering metaphor. According to Caren,
This conversation has shifted off True North. We need to bring it back to the true essence of [your organization]. Let’s bring it back to True North.
By “True North,” Caren was referring to students, student learning and the transformative power of deep and meaningful engagement with the arts. “Shifting off True North” meant prioritizing business and commodification of the film over the students.
Consulting her metaphorical compass in the pursuit of True North was something
Caren did time and again in the context of the ICDT. She seems to have initially found
True North in the art studio, during the first year of the group’s existence. Over the years, she returned repeatedly to reflect on and explain the importance of her initial forays into the realm of art and how those forays came to guide her own inquiry. In fact, two years after her first Project ASPIRE art experience, she wrote a lengthy reflection on the
143 subject (which she then sent to me in case I wanted to share it with the university
Principal Investigators or include it in grant applications submitted by my organization to potential funders). She wrote, “before Project ASPIRE’s Innovative Curriculum Design, I thought of myself as unartistic and unknowing in discussions of art and design. . . I was content to think of art and the art world as something separate from me and my life and certainly the classroom.” She continued:
I remember my first visit to [the art studio]. It felt like this magical place filled with creativity, possibility, depth, awareness and insight. I walked around the gallery, reading the artist statements of pre-K students through teenagers amazed! Then I visited the homes of two local artists. It was an incredibly powerful and transformative day. Something in me recognized the vast potential of incorporating art into science. While I was unsure of the “how’s,” I know that [the art organization] had something magical going on and I totally trusted the process, content to participate yet fully aware that I didn't’ need to know nor understand how it would unfold. . .
For Caren, the artist studio visits, the students’ artist statements, and the art facility in which the statements were created and housed (see figure 12), all provided her initial mediated encounters with arts-based learning. The art facility, in particular, gave her a taste of the teaching and learning that happened within it, as well as the direction that arts learning could take people. For someone who was new to that territory, the experiences she had in the studio became the authentic markers to guide her actions and steer her students as well as her fellow ICDT members in ethical, authentic and meaningful directions. Like a compass whose arrow seems to mysteriously know the right way, the
“magic” of the art facility held promise for finding a pathway to creativity and culturally relevant learning within a broader educational context.
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Figure 12. Exhibition of student artworks in the art facility’s gallery.
The following year, in a meeting with the director of fine arts curriculum, instruction and assessment at the Ohio Department of Education, Caren returned to her initial point of departure by stating that her “medium was never a canvas or anything. I was a spectator at best.” On this same point she explained,
What shifted me is when we went to [the art studio]. There was a studio part that I thought was cool, but the gallery part! I read the inscriptions and they were written by kids who were little bitty, and they wrote things that I couldn’t believe! Then we went to two artists’ studios, and I’m feeling it, I’m experiencing it from two different places. . .
This second narration of the event underscored the importance Caren attached to her initial art experience. It also indicated that at the time of this discussion, she might have felt more at home in the art terrain compared to how she felt when she described the same event a year earlier. Specifically, she no longer characterized herself as a spectator, which could indicate an increasingly “insider” self-perception. In addition, she was able to more 145 fully integrate the two experiences (the visit to the art education facility and the visits to the artists’ studios), having noted that the compelling, yet intangible feeling she received was the same in both locations. Recapturing that feeling and discovering the methods by which it could be produced were the ultimate aim of her ICDT journey.
The quest for art and magic. Allen’s (1999) third type of wayfinding involved undertaking a “quest.” In the context of literary “journey” rhetoric, Vogel (1974) provided a useful definition of the term by insisting that “the most troublesome term in the critical literature about “journey” fiction is ‘quest.’” He continued:
“Quest” should be severely restricted to that type of plotted travelling in which there is an original sense of mission on the part of all participants in the experience—the author, the reader, and the hero. It makes no difference whether or not the hero knows how to fulfill his mission, or whether he is swerved for a time into peripheral adventures, or actually fails his mission. Indeed, he may not know at the outset what his goal is—often he does not; but when he gets there he knows he has arrived . . . (p. 3).
Caren’s initial visit to the art studio/gallery and artists’ homes can be understood as a catalytic event that helped her better understand the ICDT’s goal and how it might be fulfilled. The studio moments had provided her with an awareness of something new: a certain ineffable quality or phenomenon that she desired to find again and recreate within the context of her own classroom. In this sense, the initial art encounters and the “magic” she had witnessed in the studio spaces became the golden fleece of her ICDT journey.
Beyond her own students and classroom, Caren was deeply committed to the overall
Project ASPIRE goal of preparing highly qualified urban teachers according to principles of authentic student centeredness. To this end, once she began to understand the object of the quest, she took on the role of guiding her fellow group members, leading them
146 through territory she had previously navigated by showing them the way and communicating the nature of the “object” they were seeking.
For example, in the first whole-group meeting at the start of the team’s third year,
Caren advised new participants on how their journey would unfold, attempting to give them a clear idea of what to look for ahead:
You start taking these ideas and you keep working them, reworking them. Then we bring them to the table and we hash it out among us. There’s this common place. And then there’s this creative process.
This idea was important to her, as she reiterated and elaborated:
There’s this co-creative energy that’s magical when we all get together and start sharing and discussing. One idea becomes two ideas, and it just takes you to these places . . . it’s powerful.
In both of these statements, Caren described the process of co-designing and co-teaching arts-integrated lessons with the art educators. (See figure 13.) She was able to illustrate for her colleagues what the path would be like, using space-based metaphors to describe the nature of the collaboration and the somewhat intangible, emergent design process.
Having been the first person in the group to engage in the collaboration with arts educators, she was able to make the pathway comprehensible and accessible to the others before they, too, embarked on the same process. And, by focusing on the iterative design cycle, creativity, collaboration and mutual growth, Caren calibrated the group’s vision, making sure the group remained oriented to True North (i.e., the kind of learning that was manifested in the aforementioned student artist statements).
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Figure 13. ICDT members engage in iterative curriculum design process
It is also important to recognize that scouting inherently involves a return to a point of origin, so that others can proceed more safely down the path created or found by the scout. In other words, it is not enough for a scout to simply find a way for him or herself. The way must be one that others are willing and able to navigate as well. To that end, Caren recognized the emotional dimensions individuals sometimes experience when they set off into ambiguous territory, and she attempted to provide her colleagues with a sense of confidence that they too could reach the goal she described. In the same meeting, she told the group:
So, there’s nothing to be afraid of. You just dive in and go for it. You know, just take any little simple idea and share it and then it’ll build. It’ll grow. You just have to get out of the way. It’ll grow itself.
In this instance, Caren went beyond what Gabbert (2007), in the context of American
148 Studies and the rise of the Rural Addressing System, described as wayfinding, or “the giving and receiving of directions in social interaction” (p. 179). Rather than merely giving directions, she offered moral support, encouragement and reassurance. The embodied knowledge she had constructed through her forays into the art and STEM-art realms thus allowed her to provide the kind of guidance and moral support that would encourage the group onward.
Qualities of a scout. Most of the core ICDT members, at various points in their multi-year journey, engaged in acts of wayfinding, whether in their own classrooms, in small and/or large group meetings, or in one-on-one interactions. However, fulfilling the responsibilities of a group’s scout requires a set of skills, personality traits and ways of interacting with the world. Within the ICDT, is was Caren, in particular, who demonstrated a range of scouting qualities that allowed the group to move forward. These qualities are discussed below in relation to Caren’s deeds and actions over time, demonstrating why she can be understood as the ICDT’s preeminent wayfinder.
Exploration and Openness to Experience. Literature pertaining to the kind of exploration emblematic of Westward Expansion has wrestled with defining the qualities and characteristics of explorers, and, therefore, scouts and wayfinders. For example,
Fairchild (1948) described the explorer’s spirit as an “elusive, indefinable, but unconquerable compulsion to travel into unknown or little-known lands and bring back information . . . ” (p. 414). Her review of almost five centuries of Eurocentric biographies was intended to show the full range of discoverers, who she grouped into two overarching categories: explorers “of the field” and explorers “of the spirit” (p. 424). She described the range of explorer personality traits according to the following
149 characteristics: (1) an “almost mystical compulsion” (p. 424) to push into the unknown,
(2) a yearning to return to something foreign after having “a taste” of it, (3) endurance,
(4) ambition, (5) imagination, and (6) a lively scientific curiosity (p. 424).
Fairchild’s text exemplifies the hegemonic discourse of frontier literature on multiple levels. First, every explorer she mentioned, save one, can be presumed to be white and of European descent. The erasure of non-white explorers from the canon of
“great discovers” (Fairchild, 1948, p. 414) can be deduced by the fact that the author’s sole mention of race is found within the description of a man named Matthew Henson,
“the Negro who accompanied Peary to the Pole . . . “ (p. 416). The inclusion of Henson’s race in this description and the exclusion of race from every other explorer description
(the author summarizes more than forty other biographies within the text) both confirm and reinforce the normative status of whiteness. Moreover, despite being mentioned,
Henson is not accorded full status as a “great discoverer,” much less a “discover.” Rather, in being positioned as subordinate to Peary, he is deprived of full membership within the frontier canon. Moreover, it can be assumed that but for Peary, Henson would not be included within this particular historical narrative at all. In this way, Henson’s identity as a human being cannot be fully realized in the context of Fairchild’s (1948) narrative.
With his personhood thus denied, Henson, along with all marginalized people is dehumanized by Fairchild’s (1948) text. This territorialization is underscored by the author’s colonialist misrepresentation of the frontier—home to a vast number of indigenous communities—as a wild, uninhabited terrain in which explorers would forge pathways to settlement.
150 While emblematic of the ways in which colonizing accounts of history perpetuate acts of oppression, Fairchild’s text serves to shed light on the enduring interest that human beings continue to demonstrate in moving through areas unfamiliar to them. With the current global innovation zeitgeist, it is not surprising that the explorer metaphor is used in a wide range of contemporary literature. The qualities Fairchild ascribed to frontier explorers can often be found in these domains as well. For example, in the context of organizational studies, Neal, Yeo, Koy and Xiao (2012) examined the impact of personal qualities on innovation within a large, bureaucratic organization (the
Australian government), arguing that innovation is driven by an openness to experience combined with opportunities for creative exploration. Barrick and Mount (1991) explained that such openness is commonly associated with the propensity to be imaginative, broad-minded, curious, original and artistically sensitive.
Such qualities were evident in the data set related to Caren. As demonstrated in the discussion above, she persisted unwaveringly over an extended period of time in returning to that “magical” place of artistic creation. And, she embraced creative, imaginative pathways to achieving her goal by collaboratively developing many new arts-integrated lessons, creating her own series of student science-art exhibitions, initiating conversations with her building administrators and fellow teachers to create structural supports for the ICDT work, and maintaining a commitment to developing new ways of thinking and seeing. As the group entered its fourth year of collaboration, she reflected, “Mathematics and science people, we think differently. Whereas the liberal arts people just have a different way of seeing the world. And when we get people into a collaborative, we have all these different ways of thinking. We have to bring these things
151 into the classroom.” The data set, in fact, reveals “seeing” as one of Caren’s most frequently used words, and as a result, being “taught how to see” by arts educators became an important in vivo code during the study’s data analysis. In addition to evidencing her characteristic curiosity, the idea of seeing and seeing in new ways allowed her to conceptualize observation in science as analogous to observation in art and, hence, as an important bridge between the domains.
Multi-perspectival vision. Clear-sightedness is a foundational capacity for a wayfinder in any context, and Caren consistently evidenced a critical consciousness about the importance (and implications) of seeing. Art and art integration provided the means by which she was able to develop powerful multi-perspectival vision (her own and that of her students), and, therefore, create connections in entirely new ways. For example, in a focus group conducted at the end of the group’s fourth year, Caren responded to the interview’s question about what features of the ICDT experience were most significant or noteworthy. She said:
It teaches me to look close and then step back. I’d be standing beside (an artist) and he’d be doing these things (gesturing with her hands to form a viewfinder). I didn’t know what he was looking at, but I figured maybe if I did it, I’d figure it out, and so I started to just see things differently. I started to see the kids differently, started to see a lot of things differently. You know, (an arts educator) had to teach me how to see art and how to see. So that whole ability to see things differently has really shifted me.
Art and art integration thus afford Caren a way to develop powerful multi-perspectival vision (her own and that of her students), and, therefore, create connections (i.e., build knowledge) in new ways. To develop that vision, she paid close attention to disciplinary practices that were different from her own and was willing to use her own observational
152 capabilities to try them out for herself. (See figure 14.) In this context, Caren was wayfinding into the art discipline, not necessarily wayfinding into the interdisciplinary
world. She noticed, observed and mimiced the
practices of those who already occupied that art and
arts-integration space in order to learn from them.
This practice is analogous to a uniquely scouting
trait. That is, instead of trying to impose her
(science) norms on top of what she saw in order to
make sense of that which was new to her, she
demonstrated a willingness to be highly observant—
to set aside her own disciplinary orientation and
Figure 14. Caren learning how to open herself to new ways of knowing. If learning is see like an artist the ability to apply new knowledge in a new context,
Caren demonstrated her learning about art by applying it in new contexts.
Evidencing a wayfarer’s commitment to the larger group mission, Caren leveraged her developing arts-related observational skills to cultivate the same capacities in her students and to inform teacher preparation more broadly. One day, in the midst of our first year collaborating in her classroom, she called her students into a “town meeting” whereby desks were pushed out of the way and students arranged their chairs into a wide circle. Next, she said to them,
It’s important that you guys understand that you have been chosen, and I have been chosen. By The Ohio State University and Miss Kerry’s organization. So we are like an experiment. We’re
153 collecting data and trying to but it together. And its qualitative data. And I need to collect all this so that I can see a shift in the way we think and see.
Analyzed through the lens of wayfinding and exploration discourse, Caren’s statement could be viewed as reinforcing colonial ideology whereby an indigenous community is viewed as an exotic subject to be studied by culturally dominant outsiders
(in this case, a knowledge aristocracy). This perspective runs counter to a participatory worldview in which the students would be positioned as collaborative partners whose expertise on matters concerning their own lives and communities is equally valued.
However, in the five years that I worked extensively with Caren, I witnessed the opposite of a colonialist mentality. In fact, it was Caren who, time and again, suggested practical pedagogical strategies indicative of her participatory worldview. For example, she repeatedly suggested students be involved in the design of the curricula and learning experiences that impact them on a daily basis. She often heeded her own suggestion by asking students for their input when she and I worked on arts-integration lesson planning during free periods in her classroom. She did the same when answering my semi- structured interview questions. Within this broader context, therefore, Caren’s statement to her students can be understood as an attempt to build a bridge between outsiders (me, my organization, and the university) and her classroom community in order to foster relationships with students that would be necessary to the work that lay ahead. It can also be understood as a strategy for establishing for her students a clear purpose for the arts- integrated work we would undertake together in their science classroom. Finally, Caren’s use of scientific terminology to create an analogy explaining my presence simultaneously
154 reinforced concepts students needed to learn in her classroom using real-life examples and apprenticed me into the scientific discourse of her discipline. The last sentence in
Caren’s quote (“And I need to collect all this so that I can see a shift in the way we think and see.”) revealed her awareness about the importance of observation in new endeavors.
Consistent with principles and methods of scientific inquiry, she thus modeled for her students how observation is part of gathering empirical evidence that can be analyzed in the interest of furthering innovations.
Later that day, as we were implementing a lesson plan intended to strengthen students’ abilities to differentiate between observations and inferences, she rightly pointed out that seeing isn’t the only form of observation. At the conclusion of a video clip by the performance art group “Stomp” Caren asked the class, “Did you guys notice the colors of things? Did you see how they mixed the colors? What else was artistic?
When I think of art, I think of what I see with my eyes. But it’s what you hear with your ears too.” This statement is consistent with the particular capacities required of those inquiring into areas that are unknown to them. In any exploration, keen observation is, in fact, one of the most fundamental determinants of success. How those observations are used (i.e., whose agenda they serve) is one way to distinguish between colonializing versus critically minded exploration. In Caren’s case, she prompted the students to push beyond the boundaries of conventional wisdom and consider the concept of “art” in a way that is expansive, inclusive and supportive of students’ critical-mindedness. (See figure 15.)
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Figure 15. Collaborative student artwork created in Caren's class. The ancient Inca quipu was used as a pathway for learning different methods of collecting, representing, and narrating data as well for exploring multiple ways of knowing.
Comfort with Ambiguity. Another dimension of wayfinding is the impossibility of knowing in the moment if one’s observations and deductions are relevant to the ultimate success of the mission (Allen, 1999). In other words, a scout must possess more than advanced observation skills that can be relied upon in making well-formed judgments. S/he must also be able to perform the typical reconnaissance duty of making multiple observations while reserving judgment on their respective merit until such time that it becomes clear which pathway to take. This idea was common in the data set pertaining to Caren. In fact, the phrase “sitting in a place of unknowing” was an in vivo code, because she used it so frequently. One typical example is a reflection from my field notes, taken during the second year:
Caren told me today that she thinks the kids are getting more comfortable with sitting in a place of unknowing. She noted that several of them didn’t know what was going on as we rolled out the lesson, but they were more comfortable with sitting and observing and being patient with the process of understanding. 156
Caren’s discourse was consistently peppered with references to sitting. Many of those references involved situations where events had taken an unexpected turn and there was debate about how to proceed into the unknown. For example, during the first year of our collaboration, we implemented a pinhole camera experiment to teach the concepts of reflection and refraction (light waves). Out of the thousand photographs taken by students using cameras they had constructed themselves, only six had any discernable images.
Caren used the opportunity to generate reflection about the nature of science, the nature of art and the nature of the design process. Part of that process, she said, was to examine all possibilities before choosing how to move forward. “This is the process of life, and what choice do you make when you get to the crossroads?” she asked somewhat rhetorically. She followed with, “Do we start from scratch or no?” Before anyone could answer, she counseled, “Let’s sit with it a bit.” For Caren, “sitting” was analogous with reflecting and reflecting was part of the act of moving onward. In fact, she intentionally created opportunities for the act of mental “sitting” to breed growth. A typical reflection she shared with me about the impact of art facilitating this process was as follows: “I think we created pauses in our work, because so much happens in that space.”
Spatializing time and space. Caren’s spatialization of ambiguity points to a key dimension of scouting: the ability to reconcile stillness and movement as an inherent part of finding one’s way through new territory. According to Kaplan, Kaplan and Ryan
(1998), in order to be engaged in a space, one must be drawn into it. In the context of environmental design and psychology, the authors found that it is far more compelling to have a physical encounter with a space if one is intrigued by it (Kaplan et al., 1998). For
157 a scout, the space s/he encounters is inherently interesting and engaging, because the goal is always to seek new information about new territories. When the scout is “sitting”— whether in observation or reflection mode—s/he is always in a dynamic, physical relationship with the territory. A scout cannot, however, exist in a purely mental space, because scouting is an inherently exploratory, physical endeavor. The sitting mode can thus be understood as a state of potential energy, inseparable from the kinesthetic energy that both preceded and will inherently follow it. In other words, scouting is an exploratory endeavor, and in order to be exploratory, one must engage physically with that space. At a certain point in any wayfinding effort, the scout must shift into the physical activity involved in moving through the territory. In the following subsection, I discuss how Caren combined her capacity for keen observation and her proclivity for
“sitting” patiently in ambiguous situations, with a predilection for movement that reflected the physicality of her teaching style.
Kinesthetic competence. Shifting, pivoting, changing . . . these are all actions that
Caren prioritized in her teaching practice and her life more broadly. In explaining how the ICDT experience had impacted her to the Ohio Department of Education representative mentioned above, she stated, “now every part of my life has shifted. My identity has shifted. I can now move in and out more eloquently.” In the same meeting, she described her core identity in this way: “I’m an athlete. A mover.” This dimension of
Caren is, in fact, what struck me time and again over the five years of this study. In fact, the first time I entered the classroom of this former Division I women’s basketball player, recruiter and coach, I was struck by the pure dynamism and energy flowing through the space. It was the winter of 2010, and she and I were about to implement a three-month
158 integrated unit on—coincidently—energy and forces in motion. In order to prepare for the collaborative, arts-integrated teaching that would transpire over the third and fourth quarters of the school year, Caren and I had decided that I would spend two full days as an observer in the classroom, getting to know the environment, the students, and the routines. This would also give the students a chance to become accustomed to my presence.
Caren began the class period by standing at the door to her room, greeting her 9th- graders with a beaming smile and a few personalized words of welcome as they entered.
Most were engaged in animated conversations with friends. She would smoothly and nonchalantly slip a photocopied sheet of paper pertaining to the day’s lesson into each student’s hand as they crossed the threshold, and most would continue into the room without breaking stride or interrupting their conversations. Several of the students said
“hi” and/or “thank you.” Once the bell rang, Caren stretched her neck out into the hallway, looking out for stragglers. When she spotted one, she smiled and encouraged him to come into the classroom, making sure to say “welcome!” as he crossed the threshold. Then, she closed the door, and, striding smoothly across the front of the classroom to the far wall upon which two white boards were installed side by side, she said in a slightly raised voice, “Okay, ladies and gentlemen . . . left hand out, right hand back, and . . . bring it in!” She stretched her right hand out behind her body then propelled it gracefully through the air in a wide arc over her head, in front of her face then her torso, tracing a pathway that ended in a loud clap when it met her left hand which was extended straight out in front of her. A few students “brought it in” half- heartedly along with her, while others continued their conversations. Seemingly
159 nonplussed, Caren began to speak then stopped mid-sentence to wait for the attention of all students. It took a few minutes but gradually a hush fell over the room, as she waited calmly with her wide smile remaining frozen on her face. While just about everything about her was perfectly still, her eyes moved quickly around the room, presumably tracking the behaviors of each one of her students before she launched into her subsequent teaching actions. Several years later, in my initial meeting with the independent filmmaker about the documentary project mentioned earlier, I explained to him: “There’s got to be some way to capture Caren’s movement. It’s like there’s a million things that happen in every moment in her classroom, like she’s being a point guard, controlling the flow of the game.” I demonstrated by flexing my knees to lower my center of gravity, like I had seen Caren do so many times in any given encounter, and then I shifted my torso to the right and then the left as if I were first faking a pass and then passing off. “She makes teacher moves almost constantly, and they’re graceful and agile, all mixed up in how she moves and then stops and pivots. I think your ability to capture that on film is the only way to really show that.”
Stillness while moving: A scout’s dialectical materialism. The idea that motion includes stillness might at first seem contradictory. Hegelian philosophy, however, provides an important tool for understanding the interrelatedness of these seemingly irreconcilable differences. From the idealistic writings of Hegel to the overtly political treatises of Engels, Marx and Gramsci (see Hegel, 1807/1977; Engels, 1883/1954; Marx,
1844/1963; Gramsci, 1971), a theoretical tradition of dialecticism affords the possibility of conceptualizing opposites as not only consistent with, but inherently part of each other.
The logic grows ultimately from an Ancient Greek philosophical argument claiming that
160 opposite pairs simultaneously define and instantiate each other (Kahn, 1979). The
Hegelian tradition builds on this Ancient idea by pointing to the dialectical nature of not just objects and phenomenon in the world, but also of what it means to be human. For
Hegel (1807/1977) ways of thinking could not be separated from ways of being. Because of this relationship, that which was abstract (thoughts and ideas) was inherently part of that which was concrete (including the embodied objects and practices that could only be explained in terms of how humans acted in relation to them). Hill (2009) pointed out this philosophical argument has far-reaching, and even all-encompassing, implications. In the context of wayfinding, the distinct particularities (e.g., moving, sitting still, etc.) of the phenomena are considered important in their own right, yet also inherently part of a larger whole that considers the generative and congruent nature of dialectical thought. As the first ICDT participant, Caren’s ability to embrace, embody and perceive congruence in different ways of knowing (i.e., science and art) laid the groundwork for the dialectical nature of the interdisciplinary Community of Practice. Those who joined in subsequent years would take their cue from her prior explorations and help the community to structure the innovative processes that she had pioneered.
Theme 2: The Cartographer (Featuring Pam)
The first year [when I was part of another group], I found the meetings very frustrating, because it felt very unstructured. It was very loose; nobody quite knew what they wanted. But [in the ICDT], it was a group of like-minded people, and you knew where you were headed with things. Even if you didn’t know what you were gonna do.
From “curriculum maps” to “concept maps,” “mind maps” and more, the metaphor of mapping in relation to educational practices is nothing new (Holford, Jarvis,
161 Milana, Waller & Webb, 2013). In fact, Dewey (1902) gave an extended description of the metaphor when arguing for the centrality of exploration-based experiences in teaching and learning. He included the definition of a map as “a summary, an arranged and orderly view of previous experiences, [which] serves as a guide to future experiences.” He argued that a map “gives direction; it facilitates control; it economizes effort, preventing useless wandering, and pointing out the paths which lead most quickly and most certainly to a desired result” (p. 5). In terms of the connections among maps, traveling, and journeying, Dewey insisted:
Through the map every new traveler may get for his own journey the benefits of the results of others’ explorations without the waste of energy and loss of time involved in their wanderings— wanderings which he himself would be obliged to repeat were it not for just the assistance of the objective and generalized record of their performances (Dewey, 1902, p. 5).
In the context of this dissertation study, the data associated with Pam point to her essential role in developing a logically sequenced and orderly view of the ICDT’s interdisciplinary endeavors. Capturing that view was important for fulfilling the team’s, which was to provide methodological guidance for the arts-integration efforts of future educators. As Dewey (1902) pointed out, maps provide generalized records of exploratory experiences, relying on efficiency, clarity, and economy of means—all of which were manifested by Pam throughout her history with the ICDT. Therefore, I use the metaphor of mapmaking (creating cartographic records) to give a sense of her contribution to the group.
162 Role of the cartographer. In the most literal terms, a cartographer’s job is to study and make visual artifacts that display geographic or topographical data and in so doing, give an accurate view of a corresponding territory (Jacob, 1999). A map allows its reader to orient him or herself in relation to the territory represented, and to understand distances in relation to its features. In the history of American Westward expansion, mapmaking was grounded firmly in a Eurocentric positivist paradigm and operated on the assumption that maps were accurate imitations of external, objective reality (Jacob, 1996;
Withers & Livingstone, 1999). This tradition of mapmaking in the West aligned with its dominant mode of scientific research, according to which objective truths about the natural world existed and were discoverable through observations and logical reasoning.
In fact, the most noteworthy mapmaking institution at the time—the Corps of
Topographic Engineers—was comprised of individuals trained in, and dedicated to, those very principles (Picha, 2009). Throughout the course of this dissertation study, Pam repeatedly demonstrated the qualities of a level-headed, measured empiricist with a commitment to scientific principles as she carefully tracked and recorded the ICDT’s forays into new territory, in a manner consistent with the work of a skilled cartographer.
Cartographic ways of being. In a debate about the relative importance of various skills that an accomplished cartographer must possess Wiggins and Maling (1959) exposed the complicated and interrelated set of competencies required of those who are successful in the production of usable maps. In order to be effective, a cartographer must discern, evaluate, select and plot data. To do this, s/he must value accuracy and employ a critical eye in the differentiation between observation and inference. As Wiggins and
Maling (1959) clearly stated, “the science or art of map compilation lies, first in valuing
163 the accuracy and usefulness of all the available material; secondly, in interpreting it and deciding how to use it; and finally, in fitting it into a previously decided frame at the required scale (p. 141). This means that a cartographer must perform multiple identities.
Below I discuss three such identities that are of central importance, both in the role generally, and in Pam’s contribution to the ICDT specifically.
Cartographer as scientist. In order to understand the scientific dimensions of cartography (and therefore of acting in the cartographer's role), it is important to understand what it means to be a scientist and to engage in work pertaining to science.
Bell (2009) explained that science is generally comprised of three main components.
Those components are: 1) a body of knowledge, 2) a method, and 3) an epistemological orientation (a way of knowing) (Bell, 2009). These ideas have been reinforced in the way that science teachers informed and guided as far as their practice. The National Science
Teacher Association’s position on this matter states the following:
Science is characterized by the systematic gathering of information through various forms of direct and indirect observations and the testing of this information by methods including, but not limited to, experimentation. The principal product of science is knowledge in the form of naturalistic concepts and the laws and theories related to those concepts. (NSTA Position Statement, http://www.nsta.org/about/positions/natureofscience.aspx)
The first element of science as articulated by Bell (2009) is an important feature in cartography. There is a relative body of knowledge that a cartographer needs, which is relatively geographical in nature. There is also a body of knowledge that is endemic to
Pam’s involvement in the ICDT, which is the content area that she teaches. The second and third components are also vital to the performance of cartography and are discussed
164 in tandem here below.
Systematic observation. In a study on the military explorers of the American frontier, Ponko (1997) discussed the scientific background and methods of cartographer
Joseph Nicollet. Ponko (1997) highlighted the importance of Nicollet’s penchant for careful, consistent observation, which he employed as a means to collect the data necessary to present scientifically accurate (in the topographical sense) representations of the Great Plains territory. He wrote:
Nicollet began his surveys from a carefully selected departure point and immersed himself in intricate work involving thousands of astronomical observations and other topographical data for the preparation of maps. He also used the barometer for the measurement of altitude. (Ponko, 1997, p. 342)
The first artifacts within the data set, which are directly related to Pam were created in the beginning of the ICDT’s second year. Pam had joined the group for the first time a month earlier, but, with what I later came to know as a characteristic part of her thoughtful demeanor, she had remained somewhat on the sidelines in our first two group meetings. The artifacts were produced on the same day that I had my first real encounter with her; she was still in her careful observation mode. She began to move from beyond the periphery of participation, moving along a trajectory that ultimately brought her to a central place within the group.
It was a beautiful early fall day, just before the Ohio leaves would begin to change from green to red and orange. Based on Caren’s repeated statements about the importance of the studio visits the prior year, the group embarked on an all-day immersive art experience within the art partner’s facilities and at an artist’s studio (See figure 16).
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Figure 16. ICDT members making wire sculptures at the art facility
At that point, there were ten members: four science teachers, three mathematics teachers, and three world language teachers. Substitutes were provided for everyone’s classrooms, and every member was released from their regular duties to engage in artmaking at the studio. Upon arrival, they were invited to help themselves to a variety of pastries, fruit, coffee and tea. After approximately 20 minutes of socializing over breakfast, the group learned about the organization’s background and educational philosophy, toured the student art gallery, and read the artist statements, which were displayed next to each student’s work of art. Next, we moved to the studio space for the first of three different artmaking activities. In subsequent years, Pam repeatedly reflected on the importance of watching and listening to the direct instruction of the studio artist who meta-narrated a personal experience while demonstrating acrylic painting techniques. (See figure 17.) The following narrative is representative of her reflections and indicates her Nicolletian point of departure:
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[The artist] just started drawing very simple circles, but the whole time he was drawing, he was talking about the meaning behind them. It was a very powerful story about an experience where he nearly drowned. I can't remember now, exactly what changes he made, but there were some simple changes or additions to the drawing that represented other parts of his story. I was really struck a drawing of such simple shapes could represent such a complex story and emotions.
Figure 17. Painting by the artist similar to the demonstration artwork described by Pam (Paul Hamilton, Composition 32).
Pam’s tendency to begin a new endeavor from an observer stance carried over into her classroom practice. As she narrated her experience piloting an arts-integrated lesson on the morphology of certain bacteria, she described her initial approach, pointing out that she was careful not to intervene as students created painted compositions. She said, “I just wanted to see what they did on their own.” In another instance, the ICDT met to brainstorm strategies for encouraging other educators to adopt the arts-integrated approaches we had devised. Pam highlighted the importance of beginning with observation when she suggested, “what about having other teachers come in during their first year and have them listen to the discussions of how we plan?” She explained the importance of that step in her own learning process when apprenticing newcomers into
167 the ICDT community of practice at the beginning of her second year of participation. She related:
I think it’s a really amazing process, because not having any art background whatsoever, it’s like I can’t even imagine anything, and then in the course of the discussion, [the arts educators] come up with all these cool things, and it’s like “yeah!” Or, sometimes it’ll happen that you hear what other people are doing and you’re like, “that could work for me.”
Connecting the dots. Once Pam moved from her initial observer orientation, she continued to demonstrate her scientific orientation by gathering information, synthesizing and plotting it into logical sequences that could be understandable to herself as well as others who might wish to follow in her (or the group’s) footsteps. Transcripts from meetings throughout Pam’s four years of ICDT participation evidence her proclivity for tracking the logistical details of everything from lesson planning to the ICDT group process. The subsections below offer several representative examples of this phenomenon.
In a debriefing meeting with the art teacher and me, Pam recounted her first experience implementing by herself an art-integrated lesson we had co-designed and co- taught in previous years. She explained: “I tell [the students] how to structure their writing [about their artwork], but we just follow the rubric. I tell them to start with the thesis sentence that kind of gives the overview of the whole project, then go into the procedure. It’s plainly laid out.” As the discussion continued and the art teacher and I shared arts-based feedback on the student work (e.g., one student’s use of black outlines flattened her composition visually, creating a graphical, rather than naturalistic quality, etc.) (see figure 18), Pam listened intently while examining the artworks in question.
168 Each time we explained a concept related to art and visual literacy, she both took notes and voiced a commitment to adding the new information to her records. A typical statement was as follows: “OK, I'm gonna add that to my notes, and then I will know better how to treat that too. But there’s nothing in [the rubric] about how to address that
so I can add that to the instructions.” Another was, “I think I’m going to make a little checklist for this.”
Figure 18: Exhibition of Pam's students' artworks from the "Seeing Cells in Three Dimensions” Unit.
In ICDT meetings where other team members shared their arts-integrated lessons,
Pam would often ask clarifying questions about the instructions and procedures her teammates had given their students. For example, when Becky described a lesson plan implemented in her geometry class, Pam asked, “So what were the instructions on this?”
When Becky answered, “None” Pam asked a clarifying question, “Just do squares?” And then later, when Becky showed how student paintings of the squares were transferred to a
169 Cartesian grid, Pam asked, “So what did you do? Just take a digital photograph of each?” then stated while reviewing the student works, “the lines have to be parallel.” As the team continued to examine the artworks, Becky discussed the symbolic meanings students had embedded within their paintings, explained the mathematics connections, and marveled at the whole experience. Inquiring about the level of content mastery students had achieved,
Pam asked, “Did they realize that some of them were not squares?” Becky explained that the exactitude did not matter to how she advanced the mathematics concepts. Rather than a myopic focus on details for the sake of details, however, Pam’s queries evidence her habit of careful scientific inquiry and her commitment to, as she described it, “looking for the right things” (i.e., evidence of student thinking processes and correct understanding of
STEM content).
Looking for the right things was a critical component of Pam’s unwavering dedication to making a contribution to Project ASPIRE and the teaching profession more broadly. Beginning in her second year of participation, she was one of the team’s core members who gathered periodically to brainstorm how the ICDT work could be diffused to other teachers. Pam’s ability to highlight—in very concrete terms—the steps in the longitudinal process stood apart from that of other team members. Over the course of several years, she consistently articulated both the experiences and their logical sequences using her characteristic pragmatic approach. Typical examples were as follows:
If we’re going to grow this, we need to bring someone in, and in their first year they don’t have a student teacher. Then, in the second year, give them a student teacher.
I think the thing is teaching people how to do this process, if we
170 want this to be reproducible.
You need to learn how to use images and teach through images. It’s about the questioning and how to use those images.
I’m a linear thinker. All the stuff you were describing still happened in some sort of an order. As far as the questions go, when I’ve written lesson plans for that kind of stuff, there’s a sequence of questions.
I don’t know if it’s possible to develop an all-purpose rubric to analyze the writing. The assessment piece will be our best communicator. Because if you don’t, you look at these pretty pictures and the question will be, “what is the impact on student learning, and what is the evidence of that?” You can use the rubric to show everything behind the project.
The final quote in the above selection points to the very specific way Pam took a leadership role in the group. This was in the realm of assessment and plotting clear alignment between student learning outcomes, arts-integrated lesson plans and the overarching teacher preparation goals of Project ASPIRE.
Measuring for precision and accuracy. In the realm of both science and cartography, it is vitally important that practitioners be able to understand the role of data and know how to measure it in order to analyze and communicate results. In the context of the ICDT, Pam showed us that one of the central ways that this could happen was through assessment. Demonstrating her commitment to science-oriented consistency and precision, Pam was the one member of the ICDT who was clearly focused on wrestling with the ambiguities of interdisciplinary assessment. In the discussion with the Ohio
Department of Education representative noted above, Pam, Becky and Caren all communicated their interest in undertaking scholarly research on the student learning actualized through the arts-integration experience. In response to their inquires about how
171 to carry out such research, the representative encouraged each of them to articulate a question that would address their particular interest within the overarching ICDT project.
Pam immediately expressed her desire to further explore “the assessment piece.”
For Pam, the assessment piece was grounded in the development of rubrics. Early in the fall of her second year of participation, we piloted a unit on the structure of coccus bacteria (mentioned above). That unit, which we entitled “Seeing Cells in Three
Dimensions,” gave rise to extensive discussions of how we would grade student work and, more generally, to what an interdisciplinary rubric should look like. We spent many hours over many months revising the rubric, and Pam solicited assistance from literacy coaches, language arts teachers and other members of the ICDT. At the end of that year,
Pam proposed that she lead the whole group in a Critical Friends™ protocol to fine-tune the rubric. She expressed two goals for this activity: (1) to make the assessment mechanism more accurate and, therefore, reliable through the input of all group members and (2) to help the group members develop their understanding of interdisciplinary assessment. This was important, because, as Boix Mansilla (2009) pointed out, assessment is the most under-researched and least understood area within interdisciplinary teaching and learning. Pam also saw the advocacy potential of a well- developed and accurate rubric. She noted in a later discussion that a rubric can provide “a way to take this project to the next level”. She elaborated:
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If you have a rubric, administrators understand rubrics. Teachers get it, kids get it, parents get it. It really does make your work look more sophisticated and rubrics show that the art lesson is not fluff, because right there, it shows the science I want, the art I want and ‘here’s how I’m evaluating it.’
Pam repeatedly used the same rubric in subsequent years to guide not only her students and explain their work to others, but also to calibrate her own instruction. When she explained how she had implemented the “Seeing Cells in Three Dimensions” curriculum in the winter of her fourth year—her first experience teaching an arts- integrated lesson without the help of an arts educator—she noted the following:
I think I can now explain the logic to them. And when they would ask me questions, like “can I do this?” and “how is this?” I would say, “well, what does your rubric say”. I think we could make our diagrams in the PowerPoint match the rubric a little better, like to include something about logic errors. I think we could tighten that up a bit. But, I think the rubric is pretty good, because at first I thought there wasn’t anything at all about logic in here, but there is.
She explained that some students received lower grades on the project because “they were problematic; they were beautiful, but they weren’t correct according to the rubric.”
She then added that she used the rubric to guide the students in further learning after they received their grades: “We went over the work and I asked ‘what are our parameters?
What does our rubric say?’ so they could see that even though it’s beautiful, there are some errors.” In terms of how she had instructed the unit, she added, “I had written down some of your tips.” And, “I had all my hand-written notes from last year.”
Later, in the summer following the group’s fourth year, Pam was a guest instructor in a course on arts-integration offered to teachers throughout the district. She brought student artwork from the aforementioned lesson, and the teachers tried to assess
173 the work against the refined rubric. In a question-and-answer session following that activity, she explained her process:
I graded them with Post-It Notes, because I’m a big stickler around consistency. What I learn from that process helps me change the rubric moving forward. You have to know the objectives of the project, because you look at [student artwork], and you say ‘Gosh! That’s beautiful!’ but they didn’t follow any of the instructions. “
In this, Pam also highlighted two essential ways of knowing involved in the endeavor: the scientific and the artistic. In the following section, I lay out the ways in which the cartographer’s view is manifested in the latter of these domains.
Cartographer as artist.
...the task of setting down a pictorial likeness on a flat surface bears a startling resemblance to the method used by scientists in arriving at a theoretical picture of the natural world. In representing the appearance of things, the artist does not simply trace an outline of their visual contours, but prepares instead a hypothetical construction to be matched and then modified in light of further experience. Through an alternating sequence of "makings and matchings" the artist gradually eliminates the discrepancies between what is seen and what is drawn. . . . (Such) "makings and matchings" of the artist correspond to the "conjectures and refutations" of the natural scientist. (Gombrich, 1960 p. 222)
For centuries, visual art has been defined in various ways with each definition uniquely impacting the role art has played in American education. Currently, one of the most useful ways of conceptualizing art is through the Aristotelian argument that a whole is greater than the sum of its parts. To do this, it is necessary to first understand art’s component parts, which can be divided into two: the instrumental and the expressive. The instrumental facet of art focuses on elements (e.g., color, shape, line, etc.) and principles
(e.g., balance, rhythm, scale, etc.) of design. Those principles and elements are employed
174 by artists in order to creatively express larger truths of human experience. It is thus creative expression that serves as the second of the two components. The data used in this study show Pam as having characteristics related to both components, indicating again her cartographic contribution to the group.
Art as instrumental. Diverse design-related disciplines all share the same system for ordering its component parts into an aesthetic product. That system is based on employing a certain set of elements (such as line, shape, color, etc.) according to agreed- upon principles (such as balance, patterning, etc.). The elements serve as design’s vocabulary and the principles as its grammar and its legend (Adams, 2013). On their own, the principles and elements of design are used in the service of many domains without intersecting the expressive aspects of art. It was consistently important to Pam that art integrated into her classroom serve her science objectives. However, her understanding of how both the principles and elements of design and arts expressive capacities could inform students’ science understanding evolved over the course of her participation in the ICDT.
An idea that Pam returned to repeatedly in interviews and informal conversations, beginning in the summer following her second year of participation, was that arts educators who possessed a thorough understanding of the science content were central to the success of the interdisciplinary endeavor. She first hinted at this idea when describing the experience to the Ohio Department of Education representative. Pam distinguished the arts educators who were part of the ICDT from others she had previously encountered. She said, “[The ICDT arts educators] are very open to be educated about the
[science] content. That’s the one thing I see is they’re heads and shoulders above any
175 other arts organization people.” In a meeting a year later, she stated, “here’s the thing that strikes me. I think you guys have a better handle on the science than a lot of science teachers.” Then, she and I had the following exchange:
Pam: If I had to choose between [a teaching artist] and [the art teacher], I’d choose [the latter].
Kerry: Because she has the classroom management and can break things down and understands pedagogy?
Pam: Not necessarily. I think [the first teaching artist] just wants to create and he’s not interested in the science content. [The second teaching artist] wants to learn the science content. She’s a learner. So it’s pretty unique. You need the perfect storm.
Whereas I had (erroneously) assumed that the art teacher’s pedagogical training was the distinguishing feature between her and the teaching artist, Pam explained that the art teacher’ interest and competency in the science were tantamount. By implication, the art was positioned as an instrument of the science. Pam more clearly articulated this idea when she was a guest instructor in the arts-integration course offered to district in- service teachers (mentioned above). To the arts teachers in the room, she explained, “If you are doing cool things with a STEM teacher and forwarding those STEM objectives, in my opinion, there is nothing that you can do to move your own [art] objectives more effectively.” Here, Pam communicated that she understood the challenges arts educators face in the current educational climate, which prioritizes STEM subjects over the arts.
She also positioned herself as an arts advocate by offering strategies that could support the arts-in-education cause. Not surprisingly, and given her own background and the broader context of the discussion (the STEM-Art integration course), Pam’s strategies
176 suggested that the greatest predictor of art’s fate is its practitioners’ ability to tether their agenda to that of STEM. A staunch supporter of the arts and arts-integration, she continued:
I’ve got to tell you, I’m married to an administrator, and I would be going home and talking about, ‘oh we’re doing these art projects in science’ and he literally said, ‘just be careful that you don’t get this reputation.’ I was like, ‘oh my gosh! He meant fluff.’
Through the above statement, Pam pointed directly to the biases of those who consider STEM to be the domain of “real” work and art to be frivolous. In communicating this perspective, Pam again emphasized her view that if art were to be taken seriously within the world of STEM, it would have to understood on STEM’s terms, rather than possessing its own unique—and valuable—characteristics that could be pertinent to how science is taught. Next, drawing on her cartographic proclivities, she explained to the teachers how the rubric could serve as an effective arts advocacy tool.
She said:
[Rubrics] really do make your work look more sophisticated, and rubrics are not fluff, because right there, there is the science I want, here is the art I want, and here is how I’m evaluating it.
In this, Pam communicated some of the most fundamental components of the scientific domain: empirical evidence, data, measurement, logical sequencing. If art could adapt these components and/or use the discourse of science, it would be better able to justify its presence, participation and value. Later, when debriefing at the conclusion of the course,
Pam explained an unanticipated understanding she had formed through her engagement with the in-service art teachers enrolled in the course. She said:
177 What’s interesting for me in listening to them is, I’ve been viewing [arts educators] as ‘your job is to support me and teach in my content area.’ And they are not viewing themselves as support staff at all. So, I think they’re coming from a very different place than what I’ve been used to, because you guys [i.e., the arts educators involved in the ICDT] have been supporting us all along. And we haven’t really had to think much about ‘are we meeting the art objectives.’ So that’s a different conversation.
This is not to say, however, that Pam was uninterested in learning about art. To the contrary, throughout the project she evidenced a deep interest in and respect for art.
This is perhaps nowhere more apparent than her repeated assertion to fellow science teachers that there is a distinct difference between art and craft, and that art is more than a purely utilitarian exercise. Her comments in the ICDT focus group which took place at the end of her third year are representative of these assertions. She admitted that she “still feel[s] like a newbie at it, but I can see the difference between arts and craft.” She continued:
If you had asked me before ASPIRE if I integrated art, I would have said ‘yes’ because I have students draw things and color things and we color code a lot of stuff. But, it’s not at all the same as the sophisticated nature of what [the arts educators] bring, and so now I can see myself looking for connections in all different ways.
Collectively, Pam’s comments in this section indicate the complexity of the relationship between the arts and STEM in education. As might be expected (and as is appropriate to her professional responsibilities), Pam prioritized the science content, methods and epistemology over those of art. It would be easy to describe her statements and this prioritization as a clear indication of STEM’s dominance over art within the terrain of U.S. education. However, doing so would seriously misrepresent Pam’s fundamental openness to difference and her willingness to understand the perspectives of
178 others. The final two statements above indicate, above all, thoughtfulness, respect and reflexivity. Pam was willing to examine her own thinking, trace its development, and shift perspectives—all in the interest of learning new things that would benefit others.
Art as human expression. Picha (2009) argued that cartography on the Western frontier reflected the Enlightenment revolution whereby medieval perspectives on nature were replaced with a worldview grounded in empiricism and the scientific method.
According to Edney (1999), frontier mapmaking epitomized the Enlightenment drive to observe, describe, and categorize phenomena into encyclopedic compilations, given that
“geographical knowledge was idealized as constituting a comprehensive archive, constructed through the geographic practices of reconnaissance and mapping” (Edney,
1999, p. 165). However, where the Romantic strand of Enlightenment ideology informed cartography, interest in the interrelationship between humans and the environment expanded to include the affective. Picha (2009) highlighted this idea when he claimed that certain New World cartographic masterpieces combined empiricism, the scientific method and “Romanticism’s personal and emotive response to environment, memory and association” (p. 158).
This humanist dimension of Enlightenment cartography provides a useful metaphor for analyzing the data pertaining to the socio-emotional dimensions of Pam’s role and her ability to perceive and communicate the more holistic, expressive role of art in an interdisciplinary context. Pam was, in fact, highly aware of the more emotional dimensions of artmaking, a cognizance that seems to have sprung from her initial visit to the art studio, which occurred several weeks after she first read Studio Thinking.
Reflecting on the experience, she explained that she “was really stressed when I arrived
179 at the studio for the art experience. (See figure 19.) I was afraid I would really not be able to keep up with everyone else. This experience helped calm me down, because I felt like I could draw something simple.” Pam went on to explain:
There was very much a warm and welcoming atmosphere that day, with an often-repeated message that "it's all good!" As the day went on, it was very clear that most of the other teachers in the class had much more background than me and much more artistic talent, but somehow it didn't bother me as much, and I was willing to put some colors on my canvas. I still have my painting from that day, tucked into a closet at my house.
Figure 19. Pam creating her painting during field trip to the art studio
180
Pam’s recognition of her emotional response to art and art making was consistent throughout the entire course of her participation in the ICDT. In fact, I remember very clearly that my first substantive conversation with Pam took place several hours afdter she painted her picture, as the daylong experience was drawing to a close. The group had just finished a lesson on fine art photography, in which they used digital SLR cameras to capture unique perspectives on the grounds of a teaching artist’s studio and residence.
(See Figure 20.)
Figure 20. Image created by Pam using 35 mm digital SLR camera during studio trip
181
Pam and I happened to be wandering back from a cornfield and struck up a conversation.
I asked her about the meaning of the painting she had created earlier that day in the studio and she described it as a symbolic representation of her family, growth and change. (See figure 21).
Figure 21. Pam creating a symbolic representation of her family, growth and change
Pam continued to focus on art’s capacity to engage students with her science content at an emotional level, an approach that Bresler (1995) called “the affective style” of arts integration. At the end of her first year of participation in the ICDT, Pam and I co- authored a curatorial statement to accompany a public installation of student artworks generated through the arts-integrated lesson we had created that year. She wrote,
“through this project we also achieved my ultimate goal, which was to foster the students’ emotional connections to the study of science.” Fostering students’ emotional 182 connection to science was a theme that emerged repeatedly, as she rightfully hypothesized that meaningful arts experiences can enhance student engagement (Gorski,
2013; Heath, 2001; Burton, Horowitz & Abeles, 1999). She often made comments such as the following: “I think it just creates a positive atmosphere, that this is kind of fun. I think they feel the joy of learning with this.”
Perhaps due to her own experiences at the art studio in her first year of participation, Pam keyed specifically into the symbolic, meaning-making dimensions of art making as they pertained to student engagement. For example, in the third year of her participation, we designed an integrated unit to teach students protein synthesis (See figure 22). Due to the complicated, but largely “mechanized” nature of the genetic process, the range of artistic and creative inquiry was relatively narrow. Instead, we focused more on principles and elements of design. In the weeks leading up to implementation, Pam asked if I thought the project was too literal. In an interview several months later (and following her guest teaching in the arts integration course) I asked her to revisit that discussion. Our exchange was as follows:
Kerry: It seems like you care about the aesthetics a lot.
Pam: I do, but the science has to be right.
Kerry: What about that time we were leaving Northgate after the meeting, and you said that the protein synthesis project might be too literal.
Pam: Yes, it’s too literal.
Kerry: So I interpreted that as you were thinking maybe it’s not artistic enough.
183 Pam: Well, yeah, because I’m still not a good judge of art, and so I know that it’s really important in art that there’s some symbolism.
Figure 22. Pam's student creating artwork during unit on protein synthesis
Pam also repeatedly recognized the importance of aesthetics, often evidencing an almost visceral reaction to student artworks as she became increasingly confident in her aesthetic discernment skills. She communicated her delight in the appearance of her students’ artworks with frequent comments, of which the following are representative:
This is so beautiful, look at the layers, isn’t that pretty?
Isn’t that neat? Don’t they look great? The focus isn’t great, but it’s kinda cool.
I was like, ‘oh my gosh’, that looks so beautiful! [relaying her initial reaction to a student artwork]
Ultimately, Pam’s background as a science educator made her well-suited to the cartography-like approach she took to the ICDT endeavor. In demonstrating her inquiry orientation, her willingness to replace old ideas with newer ones, her commitment to
184 evidence-based conclusions, and her preference for clear and careful reporting of new knowledge, Pam evidenced an understanding of the Nature of Science (see Lederman,
1992, 1998; Lederman & Lederman, 2014). This understanding allowed her to discern, synthesize and record the interdisciplinary terrain that she and her colleagues explored over the course of five years. In performing these functions, she was able to provide guidance to others outside the group, apprenticing them into the ICDT Community of
Practice. The performance of this function was critical to dissemination of the team’s work, for as Dewey (1902) pointed out:
Through the map every new traveler may get for his own journey the benefits of the results of others' explorations without the waste of energy and loss of time involved in their wanderings which he himself would be obliged to repeat were it not for just the assistance of the objective and generalized record of their performances. (p. 21)
Theme 3: The Translator (Featuring Becky)
It was a foreign dialogue that created this spark in me that this might be worth continuing. I thought, ‘I have no idea of how it's going to work, but there is something here that’s going to work, and no one’s done it before. But no one said it's impossible. You had me hooked. I had no clue where the train was going. I wasn’t sure if we were on a train. I wasn’t sure what vehicle we were on, but it was definitely going somewhere. I can tell you, at the end of the meeting, I was replenished. It was like, “This is going to be so cool” (Becky, Semi-Structured Interview, 2014).
According to Street (e.g., 1984, 1995, 2004), the traditional (“autonomous”) model of literacy frames language as both neutral and universal, imposing hegemonically determined understandings of language onto non-dominant linguistic groups. Street
(1984, 1995, 2004), along with other New Literacy Studies scholars (e.g., Descarries,
2014; Gee, 1990; Rumsey, 1990) have challenged the autonomous model of literacy by
185 using a critical (ideological) perspective which argues that language is actually a set of culturally bound reference system and a mechanism that embodies socio-political ideologies and practices. As Descarries (2014) argued, “At stake in the issue of language, like that of resource concentration, is the power to appropriate or to conceal, enabling the center to reinforce its privileged position and hegemony” (p. 567). In this study, I align myself firmly with this critical stance when I conceptualize disciplinary discourse as ideologically determined and, therefore, recognize the of power matrices which are inherent in cross-disciplinary discourse. I, therefore, proceed with caution in my analysis of the data set pertaining to Becky.
Becky played an important role in constructing linguistic bridges between ICDT members seeking to connect across the boundaries of their differing disciplinary cultures.
For this reason, I analogize the identity she performed to that of a Western frontier translator. However, it is impossible to separate the frontier translator metaphor from the colonizing practice of using Native American interpreters to further colonial violence and conquest. Kawashima (1989) pointed out the first languages and cultures of Native
American translators differed dramatically from those of the colonizers. Therefore, not only did translation require the mastery of advanced language skills, it also necessitated a deep familiarity with the customs and traditions of the cultures between which dialogic bridges were to be built (Kawashima, 1989). Translators thus performed highly complicated discourse maneuvers, which were systematically exploited by the forces of
Western colonization.
Both Native American men and women were drawn into the service of cultural mediation where their linguistic knowledge was leveraged to facilitate communication
186 between their communities and the colonizers. In this way, they became gatekeepers of knowledge upon whom the colonizers had to depend. In this way, they were uniquely positioned to both shape perceptions in multiple cultural contexts and inform policy decisions (Sutherland, 2010). However, the linguistic gatekeeping enacted by Native
American translators always occurred within a context of inequality and exploitation.
That context forced them and their communities to engage in a system of monolingualism and monoculturalism, an act of multi-layered dehumanization that accompanied, produced and resulted from ever-increasing theft of land, isolation, depletion of resources, indentured servitude and more (Jameson, 1996).
In examining the data set pertaining to Becky, it became obvious that she possessed many of the traits of an accomplished linguistic “co-between” or broker of interdisciplinary understanding. (Meuwese, 2003; Naum, 2010). In this section, I examine this aspect of translation, along with the manner in which Becky facilitated communication between the ICDT members, in order to understand how issues of the meanings and practices of interdisciplinarity were brokered among individuals belonging to differing disciplinary discourse communities (Billmin & Pearson, 2013; Herne, 2006;
Foucault, 1970/1994). As postcolonial scholar Homi Bhabha (2004) argued, the intersection of differing communities (cultures) is a liminal space between the designations of identities and in which cultural hybridities are continually negotiated.
This generative space creates the possibility of new meanings that do not have to assume an imposed hierarchy within difference. In order for this to occur, ideas and actions must
“challenge our sense of the historical identity of culture as a homogenizing, unifying force, authenticated by the originary past” (p. 37). Therefore, it is essential to name the
187 history of the translator metaphor in relation to disciplinary and interdisciplinary frontier metaphors so that whiteness does not slip by, but rather is exposed through counter- narratives (Bhabha, 1994; Easthope, 1998). Doing so provides a measure against which
Becky’s knowledge brokering activities can be evaluated.
Translating for interdisciplinary dialogism. In an interdisciplinary context, acts of translation and interpretation can be similarly complex because the content, methods and “language” characteristics of diverse disciplines are differently situated. Any cross- disciplinary knowledge brokering will inevitably result in things being lost in translation, whether by conscious choice, lack of awareness, or lack of cross-disciplinary conceptual and linguistic symmetry. In the case of the latter, the gaps in understanding are attributable to the fact that the STEM and art disciplines originate in differing epistemological fields. Moreover, this difference can go even beyond the epistemological to the ontological. Land (2012), in fact, argued in the context of interdisciplinarity that entering such a cross-cultural space requires that one’s own disciplinary subjectivity be reconstituted. Such movement and change require “a significant ontological shift at the same time as a conceptual integration of new perspectives and the letting go of some prevailing conceptual scheme. It will require, too, a changed use of discourse” (Land
2012, p. 182). However, in order for this shift to occur, an individual must first perceive and then acknowledge the unique contours of their disciplines—which are normative to them—in relation to the contours of other disciplines. Becoming reflexive in this manner creates the possibility of true dialogism between individuals of differing disciplines.
Because language serves as the primary tool through which cultural perceptions are mediated, any interdisciplinary activity thus requires skilled linguists who can point out
188 the features of all of the disciplines at hand and in so doing, build bridges that mediate passage from a discipline-bound to an interdisciplinary, dialogic space.
Ribiero (2007) explained that language translators, and the roles they play in dialogic exchange can illuminate the various levels on which ideas, cultures and paradigms operate when members of different Communities of Practice interact. These levels range from the very literal (the atomistic) to the interpretive and mediational
(Ribiero, 2007). A review of the data pertaining to Becky evidences a range of translation-related performances, from the most simple, dictionary-like to the multi- layered, interpretive forms, which Ribeiro (2009) describes as meaning-based. A beginning translator would be expected to operate primarily at the atomistic level, treating movement between two different systems as something of a formulaic exercise.
In this case, the translator focuses on terms and words (Ribeiro, 2009). On the other hand, an individual with more linguistic facility would be expected to have more advanced operational levels of understanding that require and reflect multi-faceted cross-cultural understandings. A higher level of translation mastery would, therefore, be demonstrated by someone who is able not only to provide literal definitions of concepts, but also able to interpret ideas within and across their cultural contexts. In so doing, (s)he would mediate the exchange between individuals of differing social worlds using various strategies. In the subsections below, I address Becky’s movement within and between different levels of translation and interpretation, highlighting how she, though her linguistic mediation, helped shape the ICDT’s discursive space through which a new paradigm of STEM-Art interdisciplinarity emerged.
189 Translator as dictionary: The role of the literal. Early in her participation with the ICDT, Becky evidenced her language-oriented proficiencies. In a meeting that took place at the end of her first year with the group, she reflected on how the arts experiences had impacted her students, as well as her own teaching practice. She stated, “[The ICDT] has given me the confidence to step out and bring art [to my students]. I had never thought of myself as an artistic person. I thought of myself as a creative person, but not artistic.” In distinguishing between “artistic” and “creative,” Becky demonstrated a dictionary-like precision indicative of her strong language-oriented capacities. These capacities foreshadow her role in the group, as they evidence her nascent understanding of the distinctive nature of art and disruption of the kind of conventional thinking that frequently positions “creative” as a term synonymous with the word “artistic” (Glăveanu,
2014). In the summer following her third year of participation in the group, Becky returned to the idea of artistic and creative, demonstrating the same commitment to linguistic precision at the atomistic level. Several core members of the ICDT gathered at
Becky’s house for a party that celebrated the end of the STEM-Art integration course in which they had participated as guest instructors. As each participant discussed the role of art in their own classrooms, Becky asserted:
I want it not to be crafty. I’m kind of crafty. Most mathematics people don't appreciate that I’m too creative. But at the same time, an artist thinks I’m pretty hopeless. So, I think that craft maybe comes in the middle. But what’s the difference between an art and a craft? I think there is a difference.
In a whole-group meeting that occurred shortly thereafter, she described the arts- integrated unit that we had undertaken in her classroom that spring. The unit had its origins in a separate program that had been offered by the university’s art museum
190 whereby several classes, including Becky’s, toured an exhibition of minimalist abstract sculptures by a contemporary American artist. Becky described the activity she had assigned: a basic sketching activity whereby everyone drew the same sculpture during the visit. Later, back in the classroom, students transferred their sketches of the sculpture onto a graph and then learned that they could calculate the slope of the sculpture’s lines.
From an arts-based perspective, the sculpture-to-drawing activity was simply an exercise in illustration. Because it lacked the symbolic, meaning-making aspects of artistic expression, the exercise was no more than a literal translation of a designated object from three to two-dimensions. Another feature of the lesson involved the use of color. In this, the artistic component was also akin to a literal translation. Becky said “We also got into the use of colors. Everything horizontal was green, like the earth. Vertical was blue, etcetera.” Color was used in a purely descriptive, rather than symbolic or interpretive, manner.
In the same meeting, Becky frequently interspersed her narrative with precise definitions of the mathematics terms, translating the experience into language accessible to the group’s non-mathematics educators. Much like the manner in which she distinguished “artistic” from “creative”, the precision with which she defined the mathematical terms indicates her lexiconic command of the nuanced connections between language and concepts. The following statements are representative samples from the data set:
191
We had already talked about slope and slope as the change vertically over the change horizontally. That’s what everyone thinks slope is, but it’s about constant rates of change.
Zero is not nothing. On a coordinate grid, zero is a place. Zero has a value.
Becky went on to narrate how we had built off of her original lesson to develop a more conceptual art project that taught the concept of slope through an artistic meaning- making process that blended principles and elements of design with creative expression.
She related that we had given students square templates instead of rulers to help them create shapes when developing painted compositions, noting, “I think there was a power in not having the rulers, because [the students] are so misinformed of what a square is anyhow.” She then went on to explain the precise mathematical definition of a square.
Becky also understood that every individual thought or word functions as part of a larger system. This relationship between parts and the whole was foundational to how she approached her translator role. She frequently pointed to the importance—in mathematics, art and language—of individual datum or sets of data as the constitutive parts of patterns. When describing her students’ initial difficulties with engaging in creative and arts-based lessons in mathematics class, Becky observed that, prior to the arts experiences, her students had seemed to prefer worksheets. Explaining to the ICDT how she surmounted this barrier to engagement and participation in arts integration, she stated, “I told them, ‘find the story of one piece of data.’” She elaborated, “they only see mathematics as numbers. They don’t see their thought pattern.” In addition to showing that Becky recognized the literal function of mathematical systems, this statement points clearly to her recognition of the interpretive dimensions of understanding disciplinary-
192 based knowledge. It also indicates her developing capacity in building bridges between the arts and other disciplines.
Translator as interpreter. Ribiero (2007) pointed out that any act of translation requires the translator to alternate between the life worlds of those attempting to engage in dialog. In the alternation, the translator becomes an interpreter of those worlds through the use of various strategies. Two of the central strategies are: (1) translation of interests through the identification of boundary objects and (2) facilitation of “trading zones” resulting in the birth of new fields within a larger paradigm (Ribiero, 2007). According to
Wenger (2000), boundary objects exist in three forms: artifacts, processes and discourses.
The first two of these are relatively straightforward and are discussed below. The third, however, intersects with the notion of trading zones and manifest itself as a contested, rhetorical space in which cross-disciplinary exchanges can take place. In the analysis that follows, the notion of mediated trading zones is discussed in relation to the idea of boundary object as discourse.
Identification of Boundary Objects. Wenger, McDermott and Snyder (2002) explained that Communities of Practice are bounded according to the extent to which members of the community operate through their shared practices. When differing
Communities of Practice come into contact with one another, interactions between the different communities’ members are characterized by exposure to foreign competence
(Wenger, 2000). As such, boundary encounters afford challenges as well as opportunities for innovation and the growth of new knowledge (Hustad, 2007). One of the ways innovation at the margins occurs is through “perspective taking” (Boland & Tenkasi,
1995), whereby “a community manages to translate the practice perspective of another
193 community by framing the elements from this worldview into its own worldview and utilize this additional knowledge in their activities” (Hustad, 2007, p. 401). Wenger
(1998) explained that spanning boundaries in the interest of constructing new knowledge involves individuals (“brokers”) who can participate in multiple communities to facilitate knowledge sharing, in other words, someone who speaks both “languages”. To do this, brokers introduce aspects of one practice into another using specific strategies. One of the most significant strategies identified by Wenger (1998) was the identification of boundary objects, which serve as a nexus of cross-community practices and perspectives.
Star & Griesemer (1989) first articulated the “boundary object” concept in a study on how individuals with diverse perspectives attributable to differences in their social worlds are able to establish mutual modus operandi when undertaking collaborative work. They found that, to manage diversity and cooperation across worlds, individuals engaged in inquiry by using objects that were viewed to be immutable in nature but heterogeneous and, therefore, capable of being understood as a common referent between the respective groups to which the individuals belonged (Star & Griesemer, 1989). Those objects thus became a means for resolving conflicts in processes where disparate fields enter into contact with one another. They explained,
“[M]anaging multiple memberships [in differing social worlds/cultures] can be volatile, elusive or confusing; navigating in more than one world is a non-trivial mapping exercise. People resolve problems of marginality in a variety of ways: by passing on one side or another, denying one side, oscillating between worlds, or by forming a new social world composed of others like themselves. . . objects thus come to form a common boundary between worlds by inhabiting them both simultaneously. Scientists manage boundary objects via a set of strategies only loosely comparable to those practiced by marginal people” (p. 412).
194 Becky’s linguistic proclivities were evident not only in her ability to provide the
ICDT group with literal translations of words and concepts, but also in the perceptiveness with which she identified the boundary objects that aided the group’s cross-disciplinary movements. Those objects fall into the categories Wenger (2000) identified: artifacts, processes and discourses.
Boundary objects as artifacts: The work of art. In the fall of Becky’s first year of participation, I led the whole group in a visual inquiry using a work of art by the
Pakistani-American artist Shazia Sikander. (See figure 23.)
Figure 23. Artwork used in the ICDT visual inquiry (Sikander, 2001, Pleasure Pillars)
My intention was to reduce participants’ insecurities related to expressing their ideas about works of art and to demonstrate techniques of object-centered learning that can catalyze inquiry in general. As the teachers sat in a darkened meeting space, I stood 195 at the front of the room with the large image projected onto the wall behind me. I posed questions such as “what do you see?” and teachers, including Becky, responded tentatively at first, with both straight observations as well as interpretations. As the conversation progressed, I was left with the impression that everyone was deeply engaged with the image and with trying to sort out its meaning, building off of each others ideas. I never reflected on the activity with Becky until five years later, in one of our semi-structured interviews when it became clear that the image (object) served as a catalyst for her unique inquiry into the nature of arts integration. She juxtaposed the experience with previous professional development by saying:
In the (previous professional development), I thought ‘we’re going to finally have meaningful dialogue’ but no one will say diddly squat. And then I come to the ICDT and you’ve have this thought- provoking picture up. You did a “see, think, wonder” with us. You wanted to have a discussion, and I’m thinking, ‘yeah, but this one’s going to be about art. It’s going to be a little bit hard.’ That was a big change. And I had to not think about how I was going to defend a practice that I was already good at. I had to take a risk.
Clearly, Becky recognized that she was entering into a new domain by engaging with the artistic artifact before her. However, this alone does not make the artwork a boundary object. As noted by Star and Griesemer (1989) in their definition above, boundary objects must inhabit more than one social world simultaneously. In Becky’s quote, the work of art still exists only in the art domain. However, what she said next clearly indicates her ability to situate the works as boundary objects and to position them for herself and others as mediators of cultural difference. She stated that “by looking at your screen, I could not not see the mathematics. I was like ‘holy comoly. This is gonna be cool.’”
196
Next, Becky consulted the journal she had been keeping over the course of her participation, and she read the entry from that day:
I see, feel, hear mathematics everywhere. That is my art. Yes, it is an art. I make it as I feel it. Art, however, is not limited to the fine art but also the performing arts as well. Points to ponder: can mathematics be defined? Can art be defined? Our definition is the same.
A review of the data set pertaining to Becky shows that she consistently conceptualized artworks this way, both in her own lesson design processes and in her explanations to students and fellow ICDT members about the role of artworks in the mathematics classroom learning experiences. The following quotes represent a selection of this data and are drawn from across the five years.
If I have the art in front of me, I can see what to do with it.
In the slope unit, the Malevich artwork is a better connect for me (than work by American artist David Smith), because he’s Russian, and the kids are reading Animal Farm in Humanities, so I can bring it all together.
If I were to do this lesson again, I’d have the students proportionally change the colors in their compositions, because now I’ve truly hit the abstractness of slope.
I want to develop new lesson plans, but I don’t want to start by identifying the mathematics topic first. That doesn’t work well for me. If you [Kerry] could share some artworks with me, then I can find the mathematics in them and we can go from there.
Another noteworthy example of Becky’s ability to identify and, in this case, create objects on the boundary of art and other disciplinary Communities of Practice came after seven months of her participation in the ICDT. In March of that year (the
ICDT’s second year), the team was reflecting on the significance of their experience and
197 brainstorming ways to communicate its impact on their practice and their students to
Project ASPIRE administrators. After listening to the extended discussion, Becky galvanized the group consciousness by pointing out that we were speaking the wrong language. She volunteered the idea that the most appropriate way to help others outside the group understand the nature of its experience and practices would be to create an artistic expression of the ICDT. The group responded enthusiastically, and I recall feeling a bit dumbstruck that the idea hadn’t occurred to any of us earlier.
Taking up her idea, the artists working at my organization, the art teacher and I prepared a guided design-inquiry experience for the team in which a day was spent at the art facility studios producing a work Becky entitled Inspired by ASPIRE. Because she had germinated the original idea and given her already clear linguistic proclivities, I asked
Becky to author an explanatory wall text that would accompany the collaborative artwork when it was displayed at an ASPIRE event that May. The resulting artwork (See figure
24) and artist statement indicate not only Becky’s ability to identify interstitial objects existing between the disparate disciplinary communities of practice to which ICDT members belonged, but also to generate boundary objects to facilitate productive dialogue between the emerging ICDT community of practice and communities beyond its boundaries.
198
Figure 24: Inspired by ASPIRE (Project ASPIRE ICDT, 2012).
Boundary objects as process: The importance of connecting. Star and Griesemer
(1989) asserted that boundary objects can be both concrete and abstract, and Wenger
(2000) advanced this idea by designating a “process” category for boundary objects.
While the artifacts described in the subsection above are decidedly concrete, the artist statement can be understood as something of a hybrid in that it reflects Becky’s enduring interest in the process of making connections, whether between ideas, disciplines, schools, communities or people.
The entire Inspired by ASPIRE artist statement indicates multi-layered connection making, with practically every phrase and statement serving as a metaphor for the work of art it describes. For example, the artwork, which consisted of multiple shapes
199 evocative of free-standing Japanese lanterns with a set of organic materials (wood, vellum and liquid watercolor) and a verticality intended to reference trees and growth— beyond the literal. The installation was illuminated by a slide projector containing 35-mm slides into which variously textured yarns had been inserted. When the light was shone on the “lantern-trees” a complex, interwoven shadowy image akin to knotty roots appeared on their surface. Becky’s statement began,
“Even after years in the classroom, we have found new light to guide us. The roots of our disciplines have been interwoven with art. This collaboration and integration motivates us and our teaching.
She created spacing within the written text to mimic the structure of a tree, complete with a truck, branches, leaves and roots. In the final paragraph, she pointed to the connections between the ICDT teachers and their students, writing, “[a]s we have grown with the light, our students have been enriched with new experiences. They too stand amongst us.”
By writing the description in this creative manner, Becky attempted to connect her audience to the nature of the connection making that had happened through arts integration and the ICDT. Becky, in fact, saw creative thinking as a process through which ideas and people were connected in unique ways. In a whole group meeting she noted:
people always want mathematics and science to connect, but it was the art that really got me to cross over with (her fellow teachers in the building). They were more receptive because I was doing art. Those teachers only see mathematics as numbers so what got me there was working with all of you. We were always looking hard for connections and asking ‘how are we going to overlap?’
200 The process of making connections was also a means for others to understand the purpose of integrating art into other content areas. For example, throughout the five years of her participation, Becky repeatedly talked about “hooks” and the concept of hooking ideas, people and content into both the art and mathematics domains. Strategizing any administrative barriers to integrating art into the ICDT classrooms, she opined to the whole group that, “we’ve got a better hook if we get excited about it, and we get our kids excited about it.” In her narration of the slope lesson involving the Russian painter
Malevich, she related that students sketched squares on square pieces of chipboard and
“we had this tremendous hook with the movement of the square through space in the painting.” (See figure 25.)
Figure 25. Becky's Algebra 1 students learning slope by narrating their life stories through painted compositions of abstract form
201 In this case, Becky attempted to explain the impact of the arts-integrated lesson by emphasizing the process by which students became engaged with the lesson and the content, highlighting an area of critical concern for all of the ICDT participants, regardless of their content areas. The discipline-defying importance of the student engagement process was underscored when she related the following story about a struggling student. She stated:
One of the best journal entries came from Vivian (pseudonym). She has chronic absenteeism, and she wrote to me, “I see squares everywhere now. I never saw them before. They’re the shape on the school bus; they’re the shape of the seats in the school bus; they’re in the fabric of the school bus seats.”
In this statement, Becky communicated that visual art analysis can provide a critical pathway to engagement with content. Moreover, she provided her colleagues with
Vivian’s story in order to convey the importance of art in terms they could understand as teachers who faced the interrelated day-to-day challenges of student absenteeism and connecting content to students’ lives through culturally relevant instructional practices.
She elaborated on the story in order to address another issue of central importance to all of the teachers: content mastery. Becky explained:
And guess who had their first A on this test? Miss Doesn’t-Come- to-School. I mean, hers is now framed. I have one bulletin board. I frame the best work in the class. . . She graphed the multiple representations and she talked about how she could represent her feelings how she sees the shapes everywhere. She got the movement. And I think that her attendance has increased since she conquered that mathematical piece. I hooked her with the art. She conquered the mathematics. She feels confident now. Guess who’s coming to school? That’s what we need to document.
202 In describing how art integration could address the full range of student needs— engagement, relevance, rigor, self-concept and agency—Becky “hooked” her colleagues with a story in the same way she and the arts educators had “hooked” Vivian with art.
Finally, by underscoring the need for documentation of the arts integration process and its impact on students, Becky’s story can be understood as communication strategy for mitigating any data-related fears that teachers living in the age of accountability might experience. Along those lines she evidenced her nuanced understanding what different audiences—from her ICDT colleagues to other teachers, administrators, teacher educators, policy makers and more—would need to hear if they were to support STEM-
Art integration.
Becky also situated educators’ change process as a boundary object. At the summertime gathering following the final arts-integration class meeting of Columbus
City Schools teachers in which she had been a guest instructor (after her third year), we reflected on the teachers’ varied levels of interdisciplinary understanding. In trying to make sense of the teachers’ learning trajectories, she described her arts-integration endeavors before joining the ICDT four years earlier, setting it in relief against her currently level of understanding. She said that she “made some correlations [between disciplines]. It was a weak integration, but it was an integration. It was barely crossing that line, but it crossed.” She went on to explain:
But when you actually study in art and study in mathematics and try to pull them together . . . then you’ve got the Big Bang Theory. I mean, I was messing with stuff like that before I met you. It was interdisciplinary, but . . . barely.
203 I then asked her what the difference was once she joined the ICDT, and she replied by describing her own cognitive process, saying that by “understanding a little bit about how your brain works, discussing works of art, looking for connections of art in general and in the disciplines . . . that’s where we get the pattern and things like that.” Then she stated,
“It’s like “bingo!” To me, it’s in the processing of the two, of what would be science and art or mathematics and art . . . the manner in which I process to make those meaningful connections is what’s different.”
Later that fall, in a semi-structured interview, Becky discussed how the ICDT process had required that she and her colleagues enter into “student mode”, which was a process she welcomed, despite feeling like it was a very risky endeavor. She explained the group process and how it allowed her to embrace the insecurities that can accompany ambiguity, saying, “I had already seen people in other PD groups really present important things and then things start to get squashed a little bit, either by the group dynamics or whatever.” She continued,
It's like, “No! This is where the conversations really need to go.” There will be points of conjunction that might build new plans, new ways of thinking, and hence, new practices. It might actually validate some of the practices that we need to bridge between theory and practice.
In this statement, Becky evidenced her affinity for language and her recognition for the importance of dialogic, sometimes difficult conversation as a vehicle for change. She demonstrated not only her proclivity for engaging in meaningful dialogue, but also her commitment to courageous conversations that not only acknowledge, but also embrace differences for their capacity to spur innovation, growth and change. In this manner, interdisciplinary conversation becomes a theory of action grounded in classroom
204 discourse. Becky believed that “practice is always better than theory,” and on this point, she commented:
There's been some decent theories drawn out here but how can we bridge that to practice? How can we effectively communicate how practice works and what has to be done to theory before it’s put into practice. How you need to go back and look at practice before you write all the dang theory? You should think of all the variables that go into it. Those are the really great conversations that we [the ICDT] had. It was about “how do we take this now and put it in real world?”
By “the real world”, Becky was referring to the world beyond the ICDT
Community of Practice, and pointing to the need for situating the Community’s process as a boundary object whereby it could be accessed and understood by others. Her statement points to a pathway for actualizing that very goal: engaging in conversation and communication. That pathway, in fact, involves Wenger’s (2000) third type of boundary object.
Boundary Objects as Discourse: Metaphors in the Trading Zone. Wenger (2000) argued that discourses are an abstract form of boundary objects, serving the critical function of mediating successful communication between differing Communities of
Practice. In a qualitative study of the rhetorical practices of interdisciplinary scientists engaged in a collaborative systems design endeavor for the Department of Defense,
Wilson and Herndl (2007) conceptualized boundary objects as rhetorical spaces in which distinct discourses interact. Those spaces are discursive trading zones (Galison, 1997), which are formed at the margins of two or more Communities of Practice when they come together to execute a joint endeavor. In the case of the ICDT, the data clearly reflect that one of Becky’s most important roles was serving as a trading zone translator,
205 using metaphors as a sort of currency, or medium of exchange, between the differing disciplinary discourses of group members.
Metaphor theory posits that individuals build understandings and develop the capacity to enact new ideas through a fundamentally metaphorical process whereby the mind connects any new ideas to the individual’s prior knowledge (Lakoff & Johnson,
1980). Lakoff and Johnson (1980, 2003) theorized that, contrary to conventional wisdom, which views metaphors as simple linguistic devices constructed purposefully for literary ends, the use of metaphors is actually central to the way human beings come to understand the world. That is, in order for individuals to comprehend new concepts, they both consciously and unconsciously apply what they know in one domain to new situations they have yet to understand. In this process of analogizing across domains, a new concept is structured in the mind and becomes part of the individual’s mental schema for sense making. Using a Lacanian framework, Thomas (2010) posited that metaphorical speech is, in fact, a manifestation of that unconscious schema-building, signaling the hidden identifying processes that guide how an individual interacts with the world.
Becky’s proficiency in metaphor-making became obvious in her first year of participation. At that point, the metaphors were relatively uncomplicated, yet they demonstrate her increasingly important role in advancing cross-disciplinary conversation by helping her fellow participants analogize across domains. For instance, in a whole group meeting at the end of her first year, the entire team was deeply immersed in a meta-reflection, attempting to make sense of and summarize their experiences during the past year. One participant talked about letting down
206 barriers and becoming vulnerable. Another talked about art as a way to address multiple learning styles. The conversation was typical of the group’s early years in which ideas were offered up and debated as the group tried to develop and articulate a cohesive, systematic way of understanding arts integration as they had experienced it. Becky’s noteworthy contribution to the group came in the form of what I eventually came to view as her modus operandi. First, she listened carefully and respectfully to her colleagues’ reflections, most of which were somewhat autonomous and fine-grained, representing some discrete aspect of their experience.
Next, in a deceptively simple move, she summarized the issues through a metaphor- driven synthesis, simultaneously providing an analogy to her own discipline of mathematics and providing a larger systems view to further the group’s collective understanding. In the case of this particular meeting, she said,
Everything is based on relationship building. The arts piece makes you as the teacher step back and listen to [your students]. It’s based on relationship building where one thing that you did leads to another. That’s called an algorithm.
Then, Becky offered another metaphor to help her non-mathematics colleagues understand the definition of algorithm she had provided as well as the analogy between algorithms and relationship building. She asked, “If you were to write the recipe, what would it look like?” Building on the two metaphors she then explained how the core idea of relationship related to classroom practice by modeling how she would present the idea to her students:
Remember when we did [the Malevich-inspired painting]. You couldn’t just start. You had to prime your canvas. You do the same thing in art, mathematics and science. In science, you’re starting by reproducing somebody else’s work. How do you do that?
207
Ultimately, what Becky did in this instance was to employ metaphors as a way to advance a theory that would be applicable across four different “languages” (art, mathematics, science and cooking), in the interest of systematizing arts integration. In this, she was actively fulfilling the team’s mission of (1) innovating, (2) deconstructing the innovation and (3) creating a methodological approach so that the innovation could be diffused more broadly.
As her time with the ICDT increased, Becky’s metaphor making became increasingly sophisticated and nuanced. This was perhaps most apparent in a focus group that took place at the end of the project’s fifth year, which was the end of Becky’s third year of participation. The focus group was attended by twenty teachers with varying degrees of participation, from virtually no engagement (those who had been required that year by district administrators of Project ASPIRE) to full engagement (such as the four individuals in this study). Analysis of the focus group transcripts revealed an interesting pattern in the metaphor-related speech of participants when they described the nature and purpose of art. One and two-year participants spoke in decidedly literal terms, which, following Thomas (2010), would indicate an unconscious analogical thought process at an atomistic level of understanding. Three-year participants, however, used explicit metaphors to explain the nature and purpose of art. The ease with which they articulated such metaphors to explain art’s role in their classroom practice seemed to be a form of fluency or literacy, which other participants lacked. Among all of the participants, regardless of their years or level of engagement, none spoke in metaphors as sophisticated as Becky whose seemingly effortless use of metaphorical language
208 highlighted her interpreter role. Following Lakoff & Johnson (1980, 2003), it appeared that Becky was able to operate on a more nuanced ability to conceptually bridge ontological and epistemic differences between a source domain (ideas that were more familiar to her and/or her colleagues) and the targeted domain (art and arts integration).
The most powerful example of Becky’s metaphor-based interpretive skills came in response to the following focus group open-ended question: “Have you used art in your classroom, and if so, how would you describe that experience?” Becky waited patiently, as was her custom, listening to the responses of other participants for approximately twenty minutes. At that point, when there was a pause after another participant’s answer, she politely asked if she could jump in with her response. From there, she proceeded to narrate her experience with the Malevich-inspired square/slope unit of study. Her description was rife with both indirect and direct metaphors. She replayed her instructions to the students, as if she were in the moment, saying,
I’ll give you a couple of clues, and you can get my whole story. And now I'm going to relate this into mathematics, but I can grasp, I can generate new thought, and so my brain is a canvas. We’re gonna clean the slate, and each time you’ll learn something new in mathematics. Your art is your mathematics thinking canvas. You're adding to it.
In this case, Becky used an explicit analogy to help her students build connections between two domains (mathematics and art) that appear largely incongruous: a work of art and mathematical thinking. In addition, she used metaphor-based language to encourage students’ ownership over their own learning in a manner that legitimized arts- integrated methods, which might otherwise be dismissed in a mathematics classroom,
209 because they, as Marshall (2014) explained, “disrupt conventional discipline-specific habits of mind” (p. 107).
Becky description of the project also included a number of indirect metaphors, which revealed a much more complex conceptualization about not only the nature and purpose of art, but also its possibilities. She talked about working on “projects both with interns and without, and in both experiences the nature of the relationship with the community that was built was radically enhanced and enabled us to bond and have that sense of agency not just for the self but a sense of agency for the entire community.” She explained:
With reference to relevance, the Malevich project was developed by the team, and it was at the conclusion of a unit where the goal was to connect slope and the Cartesian grid to the concept of change and the stories of the students’ lives. So, algebra was an abstract representation and so was art, and they learned mathematics by their painting. It was not a relevance I had never thought about before.
With this statement, Becky communicated her tacit understanding of the multi- faced nature of art. She described art as a community builder, a pathway to agency, an abstract representation of ideas, and a mechanism through which mathematics content knowledge can be constructed. By describing both algebra and art as abstract representations of complex ideas, she demonstrated her ability to, as Lasserre (2011) described, “talk the talk” (p. 65) of art as a field of practice and explain its connection to the discipline of mathematics. In so doing, she highlighted the relevance of the arts- integrated approach to the broader impact on students’ and teachers’ lives and pointed out the uniqueness of the ICDT Community of Practice.
210 Facilitating a new discourse. In his study on emerging practices in scientific
(microphysics) experimentation, Galison (1997) reconceptualized translation between different groups attempting to work together as a contested (trading) space, rather than a bridge between the groups’ languages, practices and paradigms (Rentetzi, 2000). In so doing, Galison (1997) eliminated the need to address issues of group incompatibility, because he argued that boundary objects can simultaneously hold (and retain) differing significance for the groups involved in the trade, rendering translation unnecessary.
Instead, new languages, or interlanguages, are formed to facilitate communication needs.
In the case of the ICDT, Becky’s developing capacity to both translate and, ultimately, interpret the discourses of differing disciplinary groups reconciles Galison’s (1997) bridge-versus-trading zone dichotomy. In the early years of the group, she fulfilled the role of a literal translator, developing her own (and her students’) art-related vocabulary at the same time she aided the mathematics vocabulary acquisition of the ICDT members.
She quickly progressed to a more interpretive role, using metaphors to create, situate and mediate boundary objects to facilitate the emergence of a new interdisciplinary discourse within the ICDT terrain.
Theme 4: Homesteading (Featuring Teresa)
I told my intern that our first responsibility is that our children are safe. . . And so once we know that our kids are safe, then we are able to teach them. And even if they have a world of problems going on at home, we have to find a way to make them feel safe in our classroom and secure enough that they want to take chances and they want to learn (Teresa, Focus Group Interview, 2014).
Edwards (2012) claimed that in the founding myths of the American West, no image was more powerful than that of the frontier homesteader. Consistently portrayed as
211 law-abiding, family-oriented individuals who possessed a hearty combination of persistence, ingenuity, and a commitment to community, the homesteader embodied the ideology, political strategies and colonizing agenda of the young American government.
This image has been celebrated through dominant popular culture discourse since the 19th century, most notably in the novels of Laura Ingalls Wilder and the Hollywood films
Shane and Far and Away (Edwards, 2012). As part of dominant ideology and hegemonic discourse, the homesteader was most often depicted as a white male of European descent who valiantly inhabited his own slice of publically available land—a land that was most often depicted as devoid of other people. In typical colonialist fashion, the myth erased
Native Americans from the picture, functioning as a symbolic act of cultural genocide and reinforcing the violence with which the land had been stolen from its original inhabitants through slaughter, unjust treaties and forced relocation. The myth also erased the hundreds of other settlers (such as Mexican Americans and African Americans) who, against odds dictated by an unjust social structure, managed to acquire their own free land under the auspices of 1862’s Homestead Act and other related legislation. Numerous women were also able to acquire title to their own land, a fact that was used in government propaganda to promote homesteading as the salvation of the American family. That propaganda relied on dominant ideals of domesticity, expressed in gendered and racialized terms (Benton-Cohen, 2005).
Homesteading by (white) women. In each of the previous three case studies, I chose not to point out the gender identities of my study participants, although there were inevitably gendered dimensions to how they performed their identities within and beyond the ICDT. This is not to say that those identities were irrelevant to participants’
212 knowledge construction and patterns of behavior. However, such an examination is beyond the scope of this study. The case of Teresa is different. The data set pertaining to
Teresa was replete with references to the safety and protection of children, and, in fact, she once analogized the care of children in her classroom to the care a mother must take of her own children. For this reason, I analyze her data set in relation to the iconic image of a woman homesteader, keeping in mind that this metaphor is yet another space where whiteness is ever-present and ever-slippery.
The image of the woman homesteader reinforced interrelated and gendered ideas of maternal instinct, resourcefulness and domesticity. These “female” qualities were widely upheld in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as indispensable to the survival of settlers on the American frontier. Anti-racist scholars have pointed out that such images not only flatten white women’s identity, but also completely erase women of color from the history of family life and courageous womanhood on the Western frontier.
Therefore, colonialist tropes of the valiant (implicitly white) woman underscore what that which hooks (1989), Lorde (1984), Hill Collins (1990), and other anti-racist feminists have powerfully argued: race and gender are co-constitutive categories of identity, which are structural as well as historically specific (Mane, 2012). For this reason, and because
Teresa, like me, is a white woman, homesteading metaphors are multiply slippery. Their usefulness in illuminating the ICDT’s interdisciplinary Community of Practice are productive insofar as they generate uneasy new ways of thinking about how we might move through, and remain, flourish and grow within territories we might not currently know but that are known to others. Like my previous metaphors, the idea of homesteading is thus a critically-minded heuristic for understanding the role Teresa
213 played in the ICDT’s quest for innovative approaches to and new knowledge about arts integration.
Entering the territory. Teresa became part of the ICDT at the start of its third year. As was typical of the migration patterns of frontier homesteaders, she began the endeavor after the initial pathways into the arts-integration territory had been forged by the first and second year participants (including Caren, Pam and Becky). In the final semi-structured interview I conducted at the end of Project ASPIRE’s sixth year, she reflected on her decision to join the group:
The second year I wasn’t going to have an intern--it was after rough placement the year before. [The district’s project coordinator] asked me to be on the technology team, because I know all that stuff. But I wanted to take advantage of the opportunity to grow, so I made the conscience decision to ask to be on the other team [the ICDT]. Because what I was thinking about was my students. I was thinking about the fact that I have students who are artistic, and for me, integrating art was always “make a poster”, you know?
Two core and interrelated ideas manifested in this statement were also shared by other ICDT participants: the desire to grow (learn) and the desire to meet the needs of every single student in the classroom. However, the final sentence, in particular, points not only to the importance Teresa placed on professional development and student- centeredness, but also to the homesteading-type role she performed within the ICDT through her ability to synthesize new information and find micro and macro-scale applications for the knowledge that was new to her. She went onto explain that making a poster was a place to start for someone who had no background in the arts, saying,
You’re looking at multiple intelligences and you’re looking at layered curriculum, you’re going, “ok, I have to get this student
214 so how can I get this student?” And when you don’t have that background, what are do you do? You go, “ok, it says ‘make a poster’, so they’re gonna make a poster.” And so, my thought was that maybe I can pick up something that will help those students . . .
Teresa’s meta-reflection unmasks the high-level and complexity of thought processes involved in her problem-solving approach to arts integration. As Nikitina (2005) explained, interdisciplinary thought is, in reality, “a complicated chain of operations” (p.
390) which one must actualize prior to achieving a satisfactory synthesis. In Teresa’s case, she began that process by engaging in one of the key steps to achieving interdisciplinarity: overcoming monodisciplinarity (Nikitina, 2005). Teresa turned to the arts and the ICDT for information that lay beyond her disciplinary knowledge (science) with the goal of merging what she would eventually learn (whatever she “picked up”) with her customary classroom instruction. Her eclectically-oriented problem-solving was not unlike the most fundamental processes involved in homesteading, which required its practitioners to undertake a highly complex set of synthetic moves.
Archer (2013) specified that frontier homesteading involved not just keeping a specific domicile (building) in order, but also coordinating the wide range of activities associated with disparate structures on an individual’s property (e.g., a farmhouse and all of its surrounding buildings). It also required the homesteader to provide for him/herself and any family members by bringing into productive harmony the physical structures, livestock, the land, the seasonal calendar and his/her own intellectual space, or
“mindscape” (Archer, 2013, p. 14). Finally, homesteaders attached all of these components to neighboring community spaces in a mutually inflecting manner.
215 Ultimately, these processes all contributed to the growth of newly seeded frontier settlements (Archer, 2013). In the following section, therefore, I expand on the ways in which Teresa’s ability to synthesize a complex network of physical and metaphysical elements contributed to the expansion and sustenance of the original ICDT Community of Practice.
Homesteading as synthesis. Teresa’s comments in the preceding section indicate an awareness that substantive arts integration requires not only surmounting her own monodisciplinarity, but also blending resourcefulness with multi-tasking in ways that support the merging of ideas (Nikitina, 2005). Her awareness that art and arts integration involved something more than simple illustration stood in relief against some of the ICDT’s other newcomers who remained only tangentially involved, existing on the periphery of the Community of
Practice. In the ICDT focus group conducted at the end of Project ASPIRE’s fifth year, several of these quasi-participants implied that they were experts in art and arts integration. Unlike Teresa, however, such participants expressed no awareness that those domains involved more than simple illustration. For example, a Spanish teacher who never fully joined the ICDT Community of Practice contributed the following thoughts in response to a question asking if any participants had used art in their classrooms:
I actually just finished a project where the students had to draw a city in perspective. We were learning about city vocabulary and all this kind of stuff. They had to label everything, and I think just the process of spending half a day drawing a lamppost that they remembered the lamppost vocabulary, you know, or, or really thinking about how to shade the windows on a bakery, you know.
216
In this statement, the participant communicated his conviction that the lesson, as well as the resulting student memorization of vocabulary, evidenced exemplary arts integration. However, as is demonstrated in a forthcoming publication related to the
ICDT (Dixon, Rhoades, Barton & Stroot, in review), this statement shows that the participant conceptualized art and its role in integrative learning as a simple mnemonic device, with the drawing process being analogous to the process of memorization. The implication of the participant’s reasoning was that art making is tantamount to memorization.
By contrast, when Teresa elaborated on her comment about art and artistry not being equivalent to making a poster to illustrate a concept, she evidenced a much more nuanced understanding of the nature and purpose of art in education. This understanding seems to have been related to a respect for art (and artists) as well as a recognition that art is not a simple, superficial endeavor. When she attempted to explain what it meant to be
“artistic” she confessed, “I don’t feel like I have artistic ability, and I don’t have artistic background, but there are some things like, and I think I do ok, like decorating my house.” She was honest about her belief, stating:
I understand that I can’t just go and do anything I want. I have to have a plan, so I have a neutral and I have a pop of color, so I have just like the borderline stuff, if that makes sense. I don’t know if you consider that artistic, though. I think that takes some type of artistic ability, like there’s some part of art, that, . . . I don’t know.
In this statement, Teresa created an analogy to the monumental task she undertook as an interdisciplinary frontier synthesist. First, she was required to gather the perspectives of others (such as what it might mean to engage in artistic and arts-
217 integrated endeavors), meld them into a cohesive and actionable perspective based on previously articulated tenets of art and design, then translate them into application for her own space. As such, the example of home decorating as reflective of her own artistic ability is a fitting analogy for the way she “domesticated” the interdisciplinary space using the raw materials provided by the ICDT’s first participants. In describing her approach to home decorating, Teresa evidenced the analogous skill set she brought to the
ICDT: perceiving a layout that already existed, reading its possibilities with the aid of a map (“a plan”), and translating that raw data and its core principles into a successful application for the given context. In this manner, she brought several “ecosystems” together—regardless of whether or not she was an expert within them—by synthesizing big ideas with practical applications.
Teresa’s proclivity for synthesizing various systems and moving between the macro (big ideas or theories) and the micro (practical applications) in the interest of sustaining the ICDT work was apparent throughout the three years of her participation.
For example, in the ICDT focus group, Teresa responded to the question “What are your thoughts about art as a way for students to learn in your content area?” by relaying,
I think in the area of science, you can take a concept like cells, where students can only see a certain amount using a microscope, and then you take the abstract concept and make it real for them in a way that they can’t get from doing other activities.
In this instance, Teresa recognized art’s capacity to render an idea in physical form, yet unlike the Spanish teacher described above, she did not limit art’s role to illustration. Instead, she was able to speak in broader terms (essentially theorizing the nature and purpose of art) about how student learning could be furthered and to describe
218 a specific application in terms comprehensible to practitioners. By positioning one of art’s inherent characteristics in conversation with micro and macro perspectives on the subject of cellular biology, she demonstrated her ability to advance the work of the ICDT beyond its earliest stages. Support for this argument can be found in a Kantian understanding of cognition. In this view, more fully developed knowledge correlates with a more systematic unity of the macro and the micro (i.e., of a whole and its constituent parts) (Creighton,1896).
More evidence of Teresa’s strength as a synthesist emerged from our final semi- structured interview as she explained her thoughts about the value of integrating art into science and about interdisciplinarity in general. She said:
I don’t think anything exists just alone in this world, so why do we teach everything alone? I teach science, and there’s times I have to use writing. For example, [the students] have to record their data, so they have to use mathematics sometimes. So why am I not teaching, for example, the art part? That’s what happens in the real world.
With this statement, Teresa rejected what Nikitina (2005) called “disciplinary monoglossia” (p. 404). She continued with a reflection on her integrative perspective:
You start with maybe a sculpture or a model. Now, people want to say it’s just engineering. It’s not just engineering. . . and they, depending on their purpose, there is that artistic component to it also. So I’m not sure why we . . . I think education should be reversed. Like, everything should be integrated and then you work out to individual stuff. Like we take the whole world and we break it down into science and we break it down into mat . . . Why do we do that? Like, why am I not a reading teacher and a writing teacher? Why am I teaching that in isolation? What is the benefit of teaching that in isolation? I don’t think there is a benefit in teaching it in isolation.
219 Here, Teresa evidenced an interest in bridging different disciplinary perspectives and uniting them in a holistic manner. This, she argued, was more reflective of how the world functions at both the micro and macro levels. Where Nikitina (2005) argued that interdisciplinary synthesis results in a larger cognitive whole that is built through the hybridization and assimilation of smaller constituent parts (disciplines), Teresa’s (related) perspective is based on the somewhat inverse idea that the whole already exists (that whole being the natural world), and an artificial learning landscape is created when that whole is broken down to smaller, self-contained domains of study. This kind of holistic,
“big picture” thinking was critical to the survival of a 19th-century homesteader. Contrary to the image of the solitary yeoman farmer, many homesteaders—particularly women— survived life on the frontier by relying on pooled family labor and collective decision making that recognized the nuanced relationships between individual needs and a larger kin group (Benton-Cohen, 2005).
Homesteading and resilience. In addition to reliance on immediate family and their larger kin groups, homesteaders drew on an extraordinary combination of sophisticated knowledge, advanced problem-solving skills, endurance, and ingenuity—all of which were critical to beating the steep odds stacked against survival on the frontier
(Benton-Cohen, 2005) While the iconic image of a woman homesteader portrays a strong and independent individualist, Benton-Cohen (2005) explained that homesteaders actually lived in cluster settlements comprised of people sharing a similar demographic profile and background. They were also active participants in efforts to expand family- oriented strategies focused on the expansion of land holdings and the improvement of their families’ financial circumstances (Benton-Cohen, 2005). The survival of women
220 homesteaders, in particular, depended on one’s ability to negotiate not only complex government systems, but also the resource supply-and-demand chains of their burgeoning communities.
The literature on psychological resilience provides a helpful framework for understanding how individuals mobilize resources in the interest of individual and group survival. Agaibi and Wilson (2005) pointed out that resilience has been linked to the ability to mobilize resources. In the context of trauma recovery and resilience, Harvey
(2007) explained that the ability to mobilize resources can be understood through an ecological perspective of community. Consistent with Communities of Practice theory, an ecological perspective views human community as a living environment in which members contribute to its evolution—in part—through the preservation and exchange of community resources. In this way, resilience is understood not only as a biologically determined characteristic, but also as a trait that is learned as part of a complex set of interacting forces within a given community context. The ability to mobilize resources was striking in Teresa’s data set, and for this reason it is analyzed in the section below and in relation to her role in sustaining the newly developed ICDT Community of
Practice.
Resource procurement and mobilization. Teresa’s ability to procure resources can be analogized to that of the many women who procured homes on the frontier.
Benton-Cohen (2005) explained that unlike male homesteaders whose activities were focused solely on working their new parcel of land, women worked their land while simultaneously supplementing their income by working for wages as waitresses, nurses, stenographers and teachers. In this section, I describe how Teresa identified and
221 mobilized resources in order to provide for the students in her classroom and also for other students in the school.
Teresa was an expert and accomplished fundraiser. I became aware of this fact in the summer following her first year of participation in the ICDT. Several of the group’s core members and I met to brainstorm how we might continue the work after the funding period ended. Teresa pointed the group toward a specific grant awarding foundation, noting that she had previously received an award from it in the amount of $3,000. Then, she offered to help write the grant application, stating, “I’ve gotten all a grants I’ve ever applied for. Over the following two years, she demonstrated an almost encyclopedic knowledge about what grants existed and what they would fund. When I asked her how many grants she had obtained to implement arts integration over the past three years, she stated,
I think 3 or 4. I just found a new one, by the way, to Joann Fabrics that opens July 15th. By the way, someone gave me some fabric. It’s in that box over there if you want it. I can’t use it for the fabric cells project, and I still have over $200 from a grant that I can use to get the fabric I need.
This statement highlights Teresa’s position at the nexus of a resource network, which she used to serve both her classroom and the wider community. Like a woman homesteader, she did not operate in isolation, but rather synthesized her efforts with a kinship group.
Lindgren’s (1996) description of women homesteaders as “community movers and shakers” who demonstrated high levels of agency and ingenuity in initiating the establishment of education, religious and other community organizations, aligns with
Teresa’s position in the ICDT and her school community as she procured material resources in a variety of forms. Not only was she able to write the grant to buy fabric for
222 her own classroom lesson, she was able to advertise more broadly that she was in need of fabric, which resulted in large donations of fabric directly to her. When she realized the fabric didn’t suit her most important needs (i.e., providing materials she needed for her own students’ benefit), she attended to the needs of others by sharing with me, so that I could share with other teachers. She also noted that she would share whatever I did not want with teachers in her building so that they could attempt the arts-integrated lesson with their own students.
Later in our conversation, I asked Teresa about her more general history of grant procurement. Our exchange was as follows:
Kerry: How many grants have you gotten in your career?
Teresa: I’ve probably gotten 30 or 40.
Kerry: Do you think that’s typical for a teacher?
Teresa: No. I know it’s not typical.
Kerry: What do most teachers usually get?
Teresa: They don’t do grants. If I’m looking at our school right now, there are two teachers in the building who did donorschoose.org. Other than that, no one [without Teresa’s help]. But I’ve written grants under other teachers’ name. So as a school wide reward program this year, I wrote a grant and put it under another teacher’s name, because I already got that grant. Sometimes there’s those years in between where you can’t get a grant, so you can’t try again until next year, but you want a project funded. Like when I did the Teacher’s Dream Grant last year, I did it with Lisa, so I had her put her name on it, not mine. But I’m gonna apply for it next year. So you don’t try to close yourself out of those opportunities. Like this year when we were trying to fund the school-wide reward program, I was like, “I’ll write it and just throw it under your name.” It’s like when we were talking about the Martha Holden one, I’d gotten one, so let’s put it under someone
223 else’s name. You want to give yourself the best opportunity to get that grant.
As in the previous quote, Teresa’s statement evidences a complex, multi-dimensional form of resourcefulness. Beyond simply procuring material support for lesson implementation, she leveraged her experience in grant writing to create a school-wide, collaborative approach to fundraising. In so doing, she contributed to the well-being not only of her own students, but also to that of everyone in the building. While she was highly strategic in how she approached grant cycles, drawing on her knowledge to land as many grants as possible and maximize her opportunities to procure repeated support from the same funder, Teresa’s technique was no mere mercenary act. Rather, she
(appropriately) prioritized her own classroom needs while “sharing the wealth,” contributing to the wellbeing of the school community, and apprenticing colleagues into the world of creative resource procurement. Indeed, several months prior to our conversation, she and I had co-written a grant application to support the ongoing ICDT
Community of Practice once Project ASPIRE’s funding ended. The grant needed to be submitted under a single teacher’s name, and Teresa suggested it be attached to the newest member of our group, a young Project ASPIRE graduate in her third year of teaching. Teresa’s rationale was that the teacher would derive a professional benefit from developing a grant award history as she progressed in her career. Teresa felt it was important that the other members of the ICDT (all experienced veteran educators) should support our new community member in this way. This attitude of care, generosity and collaboration was, in fact, typical of Teresa’s behavior and reflections. The following
224 statement—a response to my question about why she undertook extra effort to obtain grants not only for herself but also for others—evidences similar patterns in Teresa’s behavior and reflections.
Well, because I’ve seen the lessons be successful with my students. And I see that when I do it, there’s 100% engagement, and for example, the soil lesson . . . so, you know soil was the unit that I cut, because of all the time we lost to snow days in the winter, and I knew it was one that wasn’t going to be assessed on the state test. But I still had an obligation to at least expose it my students to it. So, we gave a pre-test, then we did a PowerPoint introduction, they did a hand-out, they did the art lesson, and they did post-test. That’s all they did for the soil. And 100% improved, but the percentage that were proficient was just huge. And it was interesting, because I remember talking about it with my student teacher, and she goes “I spent weeks and weeks and weeks on rocks and minerals and they did better on this.” And I said, “I think it has a lot to do with the art component.” The kids somehow connect things. Whereas with a hand-out maybe they could guess, or with a lab, maybe the lab partner does it.
With this statement, Teresa demonstrated her commitment to nurturing students’ intellectual development in ways that were simultaneously caring, strategic, goal-oriented and ethical. Art provided her with a resource that would allow her to actualize all of those components simultaneously. She understood that the education system required her students to demonstrate competency on certain scientific content, and she aligned her teaching efforts with the expectations of the existing system. Her ethical orientation was evidenced by her fidelity in adhering to the requirements of her profession, in making sure every student was equipped to meet the requirements of the testing system, and in providing her students with learning experiences (the soil project) she believed they needed for success, even when the content lay beyond the testing parameters. All of her efforts were thus concentrated on helping students succeed within a pre-existing system.
225 In this way, Teresa demonstrated a pragmatic approach to developing her students’ capacities, synthesizing the many micro and macro components of in-school teaching and learning to help them develop their own connection-making capacities. Given her observations and analysis of how students responded to different in-class experiences, she was able to identify art as an important resource and use it strategically to support her goals. In this way, she remained faithful to the overarching goal of her discipline
(science), which is to determine the causality (connections) between phenomena in the natural world. Synthesizing disparate ideas, phenomena and resources to create a supportive network for students was thus at the heart of Teresa’s performance as a science teacher and an ICDT member. During the three years that we worked together, she remained fully committed to this work, even when she determined that the acquisition of certain resources would place her beyond her comfort zone.
Courage to be. At the end of her second year of participation in the ICDT, Teresa took part in a focus group related to a different strand of Project ASPIRE. At the end of that discussion, the facilitator asked participants if they wished to share any concluding thoughts about their experience with Project ASPIRE. Teresa chose to describe the importance of the ICDT and working with arts educators, and she talked about the extreme discomfort she had initially experienced in relation to art and the notion of arts- integration, saying:
Well, I said this previously, but I’ll say it again, about my own comfort zone with integrating art. One thing is, I was uncomfortable with it, because I didn’t know how to do it. So, just being able to work with artists who knew how to do it and who helped me develop a plan made a world of difference, and it changed my comfort zone.
226
The fact that Teresa placed great importance on the presence of others (in this case, the artists) who were familiar with the terrain provides another fitting analogy to homesteading as a collaborative endeavor, sustained through the joint efforts of interdependent family groups and compounds (Benton-Cohen, 2005). Moreover, her willingness to step into the unknown and to experience the resulting discomfort, highlights her strength and her courage, both of which have obvious parallels in the defining characteristics of frontiersmen and women. In fact, the notion of courage was woven throughout the data set pertaining to Teresa, and it, therefore, became an important theme in this analysis.
The term “courage” is one that is used widely in a wide variety of contexts, with no broad consensus (Harbour & Kisfalvi, 2014). The fact that courage was needed to survive extreme conditions on the frontier is self-evident. Conditions were, in fact, so extreme and ongoing threats to one’s very existence so pervasive that a comparison between a homesteader’s courage and that of a science teacher attempting arts integration might seem extreme. To justify the analogy and to avoid gratuitousness, it is important to establish how I am using the concept of courage in this analysis. With this in mind, I turn to Kellehear (2014) for a general understanding of courageous conduct as it relates to how individuals behave in a given context. Kellehear (2014) defined courage as follows:
Courage is not fearlessness. If you were fearless, you would not need courage. Rather paradoxically, fear gives birth to courage. Courage lives alongside fear—it tempers fear, it reasons and counsels with fear, it restrains fear, and courage transcends or helps go beyond fear. Fear and courage are, if you will, unlikely buddies but perhaps not mismatched buddies. People admire the one and denigrate or stigmatize the other, rarely recognizing that, like it or not, they are an existential double act (p. 55).
227
At numerous points during the second and third years of her participation in the
ICDT, Teresa reflected on the trepidation she felt when she first entered the group as well as her ongoing fears related to art. Such statements, combined with the dedication she evidenced in marshaling resources to support her engagements with art point to high levels of courage. The following statement in which she traced the trajectory of her thought process regarding her original decision to join the ICDT was typical:
I really was opposed to going to the Technology group, because I thought I would find it so boring. In school when people have different technology issues, they’ll come to me and I’ll show them different things they can do. I don’t want to keep showing people how to do it. That’s not fun to me. If you want me to explore new avenues with technology, I would be more interested in that, rather than just always giving someone a P.D. [Professional Development] on how to use a SMART® Board. That’s not that exciting. So, I wanted something that I could feel more passionate about. But when I got in it [the ICDT], I was like, “ohhh, heck no!” Actually, I didn’t use the word “heck” and maybe “what the f did I get myself into?!” All in my brain. . . . I was like, “this is a lot more uncomfortable than I thought it was gonna be. I don’t belong here! Can I leave?”
In addition to demonstrating Teresa’s passion for learning and her suitability to innovative endeavors, this statement evidences the degree to which she experienced fear when she entered the ICDT and art territory. It is important to note that her statement should not be interpreted as “fearlessness”. Rachman (2004) described fearlessness as a quality exhibited by an individual who approaches a potentially dangerous situation without experiencing subjective fear or any physical sensation of fear. Courageousness, by contrast, involves approaching such a situation while experiencing feelings and physical sensations of fear (Rachman, 2004). Teresa’s decision to stay in the ICDT once
228 she experienced fear and discomfort was the manifestation of her courageous qualities, specifically in the form of a “courage to be” (Harbour & Kisfalvi, 2014, p. 510).
Harbour and Kisfalvi (2014) conceptualized courage as existing in two main forms: and courage to act and courage to be. Courage to act was defined as voluntarily undertaking an endeavor from a position of strength (as in an attack). The authors linked courage to be with a person’s capacity to control his or her fear, which contained the implicit assumption that the person operates from a position of inferiority or weakness.
For this reason, courage to be was conceptualized as more difficult to maintain and as requiring greater degrees of courage than courage to act (Harbour & Kisfalvi, 2014).
Teresa’s decision to join—and stay with—the ICDT despite the fact that she was a newcomer experiencing severe discomfort in a realm where she lacked expertise, indicates a high degree of courage to be. In the focus group conducted at the end of her second year of participation, Teresa explained how she felt about artmaking and the genesis of her discomfort, relaying the following anecdote:
I’m one of those people—I’ve heard other people say it—who loves art but didn’t feel comfortable integrating it into my classroom, probably because I remember as a child going to art class and being mortified every time everyone had to share their artwork. So, I have all these horrible memories of experiences with art, but yet knowing that I liked art.
This story was clearly an important event in Teresa’s life, and she mentioned it several more times during the remainder of this study. In a semi-structured interview at the end of her third year I asked her to describe her childhood art class experiences. Our conversation was as follows:
Kerry: So, you’ve said that being able to achieve arts integration in your classroom took having art people to work with. But you’ve also
229 talked about having bad experiences with an art teacher as a kid. Can you talk about that?
Teresa: It was with multiple art teachers. Like I wish I could tell you it was just one, but it was every art teacher I ever had in my entire life. Like, every art teacher. And, it makes you wonder, is that the normal experience for people who are not artistic?
Kerry: Even the fact that you still categorize yourself as not artistic, I mean, that’s disturbing. Those are the remnants of that experience.
Teresa: Well I don’t feel like I have artistic ability and I don’t have artistic background.
After this exchange, Teresa went on to describe how one of her earliest ICDT experiences evoked similar feelings. She related the following:
As I was sitting there one time and everyone was doing art, I was sitting there going “I can’t do this, and then they’re all going to pretend like it’s really nice and it’s really good.” I’m gonna be sitting there going, “no it’s not.” I can look at the other person’s next to mine, and theirs looks nicer, and it looks better, and mine is just this bleck.
Teresa’s fear of artmaking and her deeply entrenched sense of herself as an artistic failure make her decision to join and remain with the ICDT Community of Practice highly remarkable and are indicative of her inner strength, dedication and resilience. Janoff-
Bulman (2004) explained that following a traumatic experience, a resilient individual is able to develop coping capacities through a psychological process that reforms their
(damaged) assumptions about the world in positive ways. To do so, they employ strategies such as learning to see themselves as stronger, rebuilding their assumptions about the world in order to be better prepared for subsequent misfortunes, and an adjustment of priorities (Janoff-Bulman, 2004). From the quotes above, it can be deduced that Teresa’s negative assumptions about her artistic capacities were the result childhood
230 art experiences that undermined her creative self-esteem. As a result, when she encountered art as an adult, the negative feelings resurfaced, and she consciously fought her stress response to flee the situation. She demonstrated her resilience and courage to be by remaining in the group and making a deliberate choice to learn and grow through the opportunities it provided. In fact, the idea that one must commit to this sort of “no pain no gain” growth mentality was embedded in how Teresa conceptualized the role of art and the sustenance of the ICDT beyond her own experience. In a semi-structured interview at the end of her third year of participation, I asked Teresa what she thought the main components of an ICDT arts-integration methodology would be if it were to be spread to a wider community. She stated:
People need willingness to just partake in the endeavor. And then they need to be ok with being uncomfortable if it’s out of their comfort zone. Like if it’s out of your box, you have to know it’s going to be uncomfortable. Which, most of the time, if you do have growth, there’s some related discomfort associated with it. Especially for non-artistic people who don’t participate in that world at all. Like, they just kind of look at it from the outside, like “oh, that’s nice, I wish I could do it, but I don’t even feel comfortable enough to step in there.
The conditions specified by Teresa are premised on the idea that newcomers to art and arts integration must enter the endeavor with their eyes wide open, exercising a courage to be more so than a courage to act (Harbour & Kisfalvi, 2014). Her statement also points to the idea that becoming a newcomer to a young Community of Practice might require courage and resilience, depending on the individual’s background, or, in other words on her multiply situated identities in relation to others in the community. Using Wenger’s
(1998) framework for learning comprised of four interrelated components (meaning,
231 practice, identity and community), Graven (2004) tied the concepts of identity and a sense of belonging to teachers’ sense of confidence in joining a community of practice. In this sense, confidence to join was not positioned as an internalized knowledge or belief, but rather part of the social experience of doing, being and belonging. She found that in this way, the confidence to join a Community of Practice is “deeply interconnected with learning as changing meaning, practice, identity and community” (Graven, 2004, p. 179).
This finding lead her to theorize confidence itself as the movement from periphery to center of a Community of Practice. Teresa’s statement reflects a similar understanding, and it also extends Graven’s idea. While Graven (2004) argued that experience with a
Community’s practices breeds confidence to participate and participation breeds more confidence, Teresa explains how such movement can occur in the absence of confidence or, in other words, a sense of belonging. Her theory of interdisciplinary Community of
Practice membership was in essence, a meta-reflection on her own experience, whereby she synthesized elements of her personal (childhood) background with her recollections of how she entered the ICDT territory as an outsider. By offering this perspective, she was able to identify, analyze, and reflect on how best to support similarly situated individuals who might develop and sustain future arts-integrated Communities of
Practice.
Protecting the community. In the preceding section, I interpreted Teresa’s childhood art experiences as traumatic events that had a long-term negative impact on how she viewed herself in relation to aesthetics and creativity. I interpreted her adult responses to artistic endeavors as childhood trauma triggers that required her to draw on her resilience to pursue arts-integration and eventually move to the center of the ICDT
232 Community of Practice. Given the degree of her art fears and given the fact that participation in the ICDT was entirely voluntary, the question of why Teresa would chose to join the group deserves further examination.
Agaibi and Wilson (2005) explained that psychological resilience is a multifaceted phenomenon, which manifests as a “complex repertoire of behavior tendencies” (p. 195). Those tendencies depend on interactions of the following variables: personality, affect regulation, coping, ego defenses, and the utilization of protective factors and resources to aid coping (Agaibi & Wilson, 2005). While an analysis of
Teresa’s affect regulation, coping and ego defenses are not appropriate for this study, in the above sections, I demonstrated how Teresa utilized a core dimension of her personality (courageousness) as well as how she mobilized resources as evidence of her resilience in building and sustaining the ICDT community. Her data set also points repeatedly to the idea of protection, and, therefore, in this section, I examine Teresa’s engagement with the ICDT in relation to the utilization of protective factors as a key component of her resilience.
In a focus group which took place at the end of Teresa’s second year of ICDT participation and in which veteran teachers discussed their experiences with Project
ASPIRE’s co-planning/co-teaching mentorship model, the moderator asked participants what they thought were the most important skills pre-service teachers could learn.
Numerous teachers discussed the importance of differentiation, logistics (such as the completion of paperwork), connecting curricula to students’ lived experiences, and forming relationships with every student. Several of the teachers contributed noteworthy perspectives about the students in their classrooms and about their own roles in relation to
233 addressing the student needs they perceived. The following selection of statements from three different (female) teachers was typical; they each provide examples of hegemonic discourse that was not characteristic of Teresa’s statements:
[W]henever our children learn something, you know it’s because of us. I kept telling my student teacher that’s most rewarding. I know [when the students learn/do something] it’s not because the parent did it. It’s because of us, and if we can really change somebody’s life or inspire someone to be somebody, that’s become of us.
When we send a project home, we know it’s the kid who did it.
The kids understand that—and they may not be able to verbalize it but they understand it—at times, we are the most stable thing in their world. We’re there. We’re there every day. They may go home and not have anybody home, but we’re there every day for them.
While all of the above statements evidence the teachers’ commitment to their students’ well-being, they also evidence an entrenched deficit perspective, which is grounded in privilege and steeped in the discourse of whiteness. By viewing themselves as saviors and implying that students’ families were absent, ineffective or negligent, the teachers conceptualized their students as “autopsies of failure” (Delpit, 1995, p. 178) with
“deficiencies” in need of remediation. This perspective is typical of stereotypical beliefs about urban children and their families, which are bound up in issues of race and class on both the individual and systemic levels. The teachers in the focus group fit the dominant profile of the K-12 teaching profession in America, as most were female and white and belonged to middle-class culture. Beyond the white teachers, two participants were from
Asia and one was from the Dominican Republic. There were no African American teachers. Conversely, the majority of the students to whom the teachers referred belonged
234 to socio-economically disadvantage groups, with a large percentage identifying as
African American. While research has demonstrated that children belonging to oppressed socio-economic groups experience greater threats to their well-being (such as chaotic environments, family trauma, familial instability, and, among others, inadequate nutrition
(Agaibi & Wilson, 2005; Harkness, 1993; Caffo & Belaise, 2003), the assumptions about urban students embedded in the above statements reflect a discourse of whiteness. That discourse assumes a norm of comparison, with the subversive message that children of lower socio-economic status need to be protected and saved by those belonging to the dominant group (white teachers). Not only were the teachers’ statements reflective of their failure to deconstruct the systems and structures of oppression that result in the enormous stresses unfairly placed on many of the students’ families, they were also reflective of the racist and classist standard by which all non-dominant groups are judged
(Brennan, 2008). The teachers’ well-intentioned assertions amounted to a broad condemnation of all urban students’ families. To assume that students are not cared for at home is to view their families through a lens that assumes deficits and also privileges dominant culture. In this respect, the teachers’ white privilege was revealed as the
“dominating, controlling and manipulative standard to which all ‘Others’ are compared and ranked” (Brennan, 2008). Teresa, however was different.
Upon listening to her colleagues’ statements, Teresa contributed the following comment, which reflected the essence of her role in the ICDT and how she saw her role as a teacher:
I told my intern that our first responsibility is that our children are safe. . . And so once we know that our kids are safe, then we are able to teach them. And even if they have a world of problems
235 going on at home, we have to find a way to make them feel safe in our classroom and secure enough that they want to take chances and they want to learn.
There are several significant components to Teresa’s statement. The first is her use of the word “responsibility”. In contrast to the other teachers’ self-laudatory assertions that, by implication, insulated them from any potential criticism associated with student under- performance, Teresa focused on herself for the sole purpose of upholding her duties and being accountable for her students’ success. Rather than displacing blame and congratulating herself, she accepted responsibility for her students on multiple levels while making it clear that she was not enacting a deficit-oriented default-mode of thinking (Florio-Ruane, 2001). The term “responsibility” in this statement can be interpreted as pertaining either to a legal accountability (as in, within the requirements of her professional position), to a moral obligation, or to both. The second significant dimension of Teresa’s statement is her focus on safety. The manner in which she languaged her statements about the priority of student safety and the possibility of problems at home (using the phrase “even if”) indicates an acknowledgement of the socio-economic hardships—and their accompanying threats to well-being—that many of her students faced. However, the use of the conditional phrase indicates her nuanced understanding and a critically minded avoidance of the sweeping generalizations that characterized her colleagues’ comments. Kinloch (2015) argued that through languaging experiences, “we gain a deeper understanding of who we are, of the work we do, and of the challenges that we must continuously work against in making our work available” to other people (p. 30). In other words, languaging, for Kinloch, signifies a commitment to
236 name who we are in relation to who others are, and to both name and work against the terror of violence and oppression that is imposed onto people. As Korbin (2003) pointed out, violence and trauma are complex phenomena, “rooted in both individual pathology and structural inequalities that compromise parents’ abilities to care for their children” (p.
433). The languaging of Teresa’s statement thus indicates a nuanced, counterhegemonic understanding of this complexity and includes her refusal to assume that all poor families are abusive or neglectful.
The third significant component of Teresa’s comment was her assertion that students must feel safe in order to take chances which is what leads to growth. This statement has much in common with the aforementioned comments pertaining to courage as a pre-condition for adults entering into an arts-Community of Practice and pertaining to the discomfort that can be associated with learning. Mirroring her thoughts about adult learning, then, Teresa prioritized cultivating her students resilience capacities, paying special heed to traumatic conditions that could be at play, all in a manner that lacked the obvious discourse of privilege that characterized her colleagues’ comments.
As I came to know Teresa over the course of our three years together, I was privileged to learn from her and to benefit from her thoughtful insights. Toward the end of the third year, she asked me if I would write a letter of recommendation in support of her application to a curriculum directorship in the district. In the final paragraph of the letter, I wrote that Teresa has “an unparalleled decency that manifests itself in everything she does. She is a person of absolute integrity”. Several months later, as I was in the process of analyzing data and completing this writing, I thought about her integrity and its relationship to her commitment to safety and protection, which led me to conduct
237 several follow-up conversations specifically about the idea of safety. In analyzing her data, I told her, I noticed that she was particularly focused on the idea of safety and I asked her why. She responded with the following:
It goes back to obviously, if you’re not feeling safe somewhere you’re not feeling comfortable. Have you ever been in a grocery store or somewhere and you get that feeling, then your whole attention is toward that safety feeling? If you have that feeling, then you’re not going to sit back and learn. Somehow we need to make our classrooms that safe place where children can concentrate on learning.
Since I had never myself experienced the feeling of being unsafe in a grocery story, I was somewhat perplexed, struck by the fact that such a setting provided an obvious and typical example for Teresa. When I asked her to elaborate, she explained:
Our jobs are to be teachers, but at a certain point, before being a teacher, my job is to be a human being, so I have to look at safety first. We’re human beings, and we’re in society and you hear about those situations where people could stop and help and they chose not to. . . My first job is to be a human being to my fellow human beings. As a mother, isn’t my job to care for the human beings who are entrusted to me, and shouldn’t that trump all other things? And as a teacher, teaching those is a top priority, but it isn’t really my first priority. It is caring for students. It’s like saying to a nurse that their job is to give medical care, but actually, it is to give compassion.
When I asked Teresa about her commitment to these principles, she responded simply, “wouldn’t it be a sad world if people didn’t put those human factors first.” I pressed her on the source of this perspective, and she shared the following story:
Twenty-three years of teaching and I remember it like it was yesterday. A girl had identified to me that she was being physically abused by her step-father, and I saw the bruises on her body, and we’re not talking like one or two little bruises. There were a lot of bruises. . . I took her to the nurse, notified the principal and made
238 the call [to Children’s Services]. At that point I was teaching 6th grade in a K6 building, and her younger brother who was also in the school had been held by his ankles and dropped face first down a set of stairs.
At that point, Teresa began to cry. Then, she said, “Like, I don’t know how that child survived. His step-father dropped him head-first down a flight of stairs!” She continued:
I get that people have bad things that happen in their childhood, but at a certain point as an adult, you’re responsible for your actions. Maybe the step-father had something happen to him in his childhood, and I’m sorry to hear that happened to him, but at the same time, it doesn’t excuse his behavior as an adult. You’re an adult, and at a certain point, you make a decision, right or wrong.
At that point, I was still thinking there was justice in life, and you’re kind of naïve at that age, and I’m calling Children’s Services thinking I’m helping this girl, and they refused to remove the children from the home. They thought it was more important to keep the family together than to protect the children. So, I find out I’m helpless. It’s a horrible feeling when you go home knowing you’re going to be safe that night, and you know this child isn’t going to be safe at night. I saw the girl years later, and I felt so guilty.
I then asked Teresa if she said anything about the incident to the girl when she saw her again. She responded, saying,
No. Looking back now, I wish I had said, “I tried to help you, and I’m so sorry that the way society is set up that nothing could be done for you,” but at that moment I felt such guilt, such guilt, and looking back at that situation, if that happened to me today, I would not accept them saying “we’re trying to keep the family together.” I would have been calling the police every single day. But at that point, I don’t think I had the tools or the knowledge to say, “I’m going to call every day, and I’m going to call the police the second I see a bruise on her.” I would be so persistent that they would do something just to shut me up.
239 In order to fully understand the import of this statement and to relate it to the important set of skills, attitudes and knowledge Teresa contributed to the ICDT
Community of Practice, I turn once again to the literature on psychological resilience, situating her perspective within the context of trauma and survivorship. I do so with
Teresa’s permission.
Teresa is the survivor of childhood sexual abuse by a Catholic priest. Given this history, her data set, with its intertwined themes of safety, courage, resourcefulness and integrity, can be understood in relation to the experience of survivors of trauma. When I asked her if she would be willing to talk about her experience of abuse, she demonstrating her courage yet again, she said, “I’m ok with it. It’s public knowledge. But
I always fear that I’m going to have some student find out . . . It’s not a discussion I would ever have with a student.” Then, she explained:
Going public I felt such shame and humiliation. I’m past that now, but I could never describe the process that someone goes through, because it is so deeply personal, and to have that information out there and to have that information and your face out there, and people look at you and some people feel uncomfortable. Like, I always try to comfort someone who’s uncomfortable with me, but inside I just want to say, “I don’t want to comfort you!” Part of my life process is to know I don’t carry any shame with it. I don’t have any shame related to that. It’s not my shame to carry anymore.
Part of not carrying that shame was to acknowledge it and name it. This represents an active coping strategy for processing trauma-related stress. Barratta, Rozeske and Faier
(2013) explained that this strategy—in which individuals are able to exert behavior control over some aspect of the trauma—can provide the foundation for resilience and recovery. Along these lines, Teresa suggested I read about her story online, which was
240 reported when as an adult, she gave public testimony to support legislation extending the statute of limitations related to bringing legal action against perpetrators of child sexual abuse. I did as she suggested and read her story online. The fact that she was able to exhibit such positive perspective in the aftermath of the abuse makes her nothing short of remarkable. Whereas others might understandably succumb to hopelessness, helplessness, and even the perpetuation of violence (Scher & Resick, 2005), Teresa derived strength, purpose and meaning in supporting and protecting others. She continually leveraged the insights acquired through her lived experiences to protect children, courageously act in ways that affirmed and reaffirmed her humanity. The literature on psychological resilience to trauma, suggests that prosocial behavior such as
Teresa’s can be both the by-product and the source of personal healing (Hernández-
Wolfe, 2010).
Teresa’s commitment to the ICDT and to mobilizing resources to support it can thus be understood as part of her legal and ethical commitment to caring for her students.
As long as the ICDT flourished, Teresa had access to resources that would support those students, and, as she told me when concluding her thoughts about the abuse she had suffered, “I’ll always be grateful for my parents bringing me up to get an education. I really do think education is the only way that you can escape bad situations.” For Teresa, then, education was another form of protection. As she so succinctly put it, “we all have an obligation to protect those who can’t protect themselves.” In this, she distinguished herself from deficit-minded teacher “saviors,” evidencing instead an extraordinary form of resilience centered on agency, care and courage—all of which she contributed to sustaining the ICDT endeavor.
241
Figure 26. Artwork by one of Teresa’s 6th-grade students, representing the process of evaporation and three states of matter
Figure 27. Collaborative artwork by Teresa's 6th-grade students, representing plant and animal cells and their organelles 242
Conclusion
Byrne (2011) pointed out that models are necessarily simplified representations of the world, which provide social scientists with one of their most important intellectual tools. Metaphors can be conceptualized as one such model, abstracting to a point of comprehensibility phenomena that are too complex to understand otherwise. Nisbet
(1969) put it this way: “The larger, the more general, abstract, and distant in experience the object of our interest, the greater the utility of the metaphor” (p. 240).
In this chapter, I have presented an analysis of four data sets, extracted from a larger case (the ICDT), which was similarly exacted from an even larger case (Project
ASPIRE). My study participants generously contributed copious amounts of data as we worked intensely and learned meaningfully together over a lengthy period of time. Not only did metaphors allow me to make sense of the complex, overlapping interactions that grew from the multiple years we all spent together, they also imposed an order on my analysis, inherently creating as well as discovering the likeness I have offered (Miller,
1979). In the following chapter, I continue my metaphors of frontier activity in the context of STEM-Art integration, urban education, and interdisciplinarity, ever aware that choosing language is much like choosing a world (Rosenthal, 1982). Because analogies and metaphors possess the special power to create the worlds they explain and because I seek to position this study as a Project of Humanization (Kinloch, 2015a;
Kinloch & San Pedro, 2014; Kinloch, 2014), the metaphors I use to explain my case studies—scouting, mapmaking, interpreting and homesteading—are leveraged to create a conceptual framework that simultaneously builds on prior theorizing and resists the
243 colonializing implications of the metaphors in their unproblematized state. In this, I believe that the ICDT and the ways in which my study participants contributed to its interdisciplinary Community of Practice afford a pathway to redefining what it might mean to explore and shape new territories of knowledge (Lefebvre [1984] included in these, the physical, the mental and the social). As I argue in the following and final chapter (Chapter 5), Caren, Pam, Becky and Teresa together provide guidance on how such exploration and (re)shaping can be enacted in ways that are justice- and equity- oriented.
244
Chapter 5:
Cultural Humility in the Interdisciplinary Contact Zone
I began this dissertation study by asking how teachers at the secondary level might adopt substantive arts-integrated approaches in their mathematics and science professional practices. To answer that question, I was guided by two additional sub- questions, which were as follows:
1. What influenced this study’s participants to explore arts integration in their middle and high school-level classrooms?
2. What are the characteristics of the teachers who demonstrate an enduring commitment to arts-integration?
To answer these questions, I constructed a conceptual framework, which I situated under the broad umbrella of sociocultural theory (e.g., Vygotsky, 1978; Wertsch,
1991; Herne, 2006; Moll, 2014). My conceptual framework relied on three main bodies of literature: interdisciplinarity (Apostel, Berger, Briggs & Michaud, 1972; Becher, 1989;
Klein, 1990; Boix Mansilla, 2006, 2008, 2009; Dillon, 2001), teacher inquiry (Cochran-
Smith & Lytle, 2009) and Communities of Practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991). (See Figure
28.)
245 Design Interdisciplinarity Inquiry Inquiry
Apprentice- Collaboration ship
Communities of Practice
Figure 28. Proposed Conceptual Framework: Three Primary Theoretical Lenses and their Intersections
As I analyzed the data sets of the four participants—Caren, Pam, Becky and
Teresa, each of whom I chose based on their demonstrated commitment to STEM-Art integration—it became clear that how they individually engaged in the ICDT inquiry was pivotal in ushering the Community of Practice forward from its foundation through the five years of its existence. By exploring the roles of the participants and by being a participant myself in the ICDT Community of Practice, I was able to witness the evolution of the group’s interdisciplinary understandings, art-integrated curricular units of study, and pedagogical innovations. However, the development of interdisciplinary understanding and the innovations resulting therefrom were not guaranteed at the outset of the inquiry.
As Lattuca (2001) pointed out, most definitions of interdisciplinarity consider the integration of disciplines to be definitional to interdisciplinary thinking. Efforts that fail
246 to integrate are more appropriately categorized multidisciplinary whereby disciplines are simply juxtaposed, rather than blended (Klein, 2010). This perspective was inherent in my adoption of Project Zero’s framework for interdisciplinary understanding, which calls for integration as the third of that framework’s three components (purposefulness was the first, and disciplinary grounding was the second) (Boix Mansilla, 2006). Klein (2010) explained that when integration takes place between disciplines that have little or no compatibility in terms of their methods, paradigms and epistemologies (such as the
STEM fields and art), the “wide interdisciplinarity” (p. 20) becomes much more difficult to achieve. As was the case in the ICDT, wide interdisciplinarity requires a staunch commitment to collaborating across disciplinary differences, and it underscores the need for successful communication and teamwork.
Collaboration is a process that is based on the premise of relationship building over time (Frey et al., 2006). In the context of interorganizational collaborations, Davis and Eisenhardt (2011) found that partners on a project must continually access their complementary capabilities in order to develop their innovation capabilities. Without accessing and leveraging the capabilities of all partners, the collaboration process is stymied. As a result, innovation outcomes are less likely to occur (Davis & Eisenhardt,
2011). However, the question of how to access and leverage partner capabilities is less clear. In the case of this dissertation study, the ICDT participants can be analogized to
Davis and Eisenhardt’s organizational partners. Therefore, analyzing how Caren, Pam,
Becky and Teresa performed the roles of scout, cartographer, translator and homesteader indicates how they each accessed and leveraged their capacities to benefit the ICDT
Community of Practice. This, in turn, illuminates the underlying mechanisms of the
247 group’s inquiry process, thereby explaining the how of the ICDT’s wide interdisciplinarity. Understanding this process has important implications for developing and systematizing STEM-Art integrated equity pedagogies.
Summary of Findings
In Chapter 4, I explained how Caren, Pam, Becky and Teresa engaged in STEM-
Art integration by illustrating the ways in which each of the four women performed specific roles within the ICDT Community of Practice. Drawing on qualitative data generated over five years of collaboration, I illustrated that those four roles were fundamental to the establishment, growth and sustenance of the Community of Practice.
Using a sociocultural perspective on learning, I explained that through their identities within the Community of Practice, the research participants enacted STEM-Art interdisciplinarity in ways that aligned with Boix Mansilla’s (2006) framework for interdisciplinarity, which I cited in Chapter 2. While not purporting to present a single grand narrative about how interdisciplinarity should be understood or actualized, this dissertation study demonstrated that the substantive STEM-Art integration enacted by the
ICDT transformed the participants’ pedagogical practices, even though the cards were stacked against this result (Peters, 1999; Hackett & Rhoten, 2009). Therefore, theories and methodologies grounded in the ICDT’s practices provide important empirically- based guidance for substantive and enduring STEM-Art integration.
In taking up the common practice of conceptualizing knowledge construction in spatialized terms, I pointed out that the participants’ STEM-Art learning was a process of disciplinary and interdisciplinary boundary crossing. From the sociocultural perspective, disciplines were framed as cultures or paradigms, each with their own ontological,
248 epistemological, methodological and linguistic orientations (Peters, 1999; Klein, 2005;
Billman & Pearson, 2013; Joubish et al., 2011). Therefore, when Caren, Pam, Becky and
Teresa encountered the physical and intellectual space of art, a type of multicultural contact zone (Pratt, 1991) was formed. Each of the research participants drew on their prior knowledge, their dispositions and their commitment to others (i.e., the ICDT group,
Project ASPIRE, future urban educators, and—first and foremost—students) to make their way across their disciplinary boundaries, into the contact zone and then back again to affect change within their originary domains.
Examining how the participants conceptualized and actualized STEM-Art integration revealed that each of the four women approached interdisciplinarity in distinctly different ways. Yet, they were united in the implicit and explicit agreement that art was not the same as their disciplines. Further, they all communicated their belief that art, due to its unique qualities, contributed something fundamentally important, and even transformative, to their students’ (and their own) lives. This finding was important, because numerous contemporary STEM-Art initiatives are built on the false premise of sameness. Many enthusiastic stakeholders have attempted to advocate for the inclusion of the arts in STEM (and vice versa) by arguing, for example, that while the content of science and art is different, their methods and the thinking skills they develop are the same (Buczynski, Ireland, Reed & Lacanienta, 2012). On the other hand, in adopting
Boix Mansilla’s (2006) framework for interdisciplinarity and taking a critical, multicultural stance, this dissertation rejected a melting-pot approach to STEM-Art integration. As Boix Mansilla’s (2006) framework specifies, the recognition of each discipline’s unique qualities is fundamentally important for rigorous interdisciplinary
249 endeavors. From a critical perspective, this stance is particularly important in initiatives that unite disciplines whose stakeholders are positioned inequitably in relation to one another in terms of material resources and institutionalized status. The danger of an assimilationist stance is that the more marginalized discipline (and, therefore, the individuals whose identities are shaped in and through that discipline) would be colonized to serve the needs of the dominant discipline(s).
Communication and Collaboration across Worldviews
As I discussed in Chapter 2, disciplines can be understood as cultures, each characterized by unique discourses that are continually shaped by their members.
Reciprocally, disciplinary discourse community members are shaped by the discourses of their disciplines. Within this recursive cycle, discourse, identity and culture are all anchored in members’ shared ontological and epistemological perspectives. These perspectives and cultural components become synthesized into paradigms (worldviews) that exist as closed systems until they intersect with other paradigms (Muresan & Flueres,
2009). When paradigms intersect, conflict can ensue and paradigmatic perspectives can be reified rather than expanded. Van Tongeren et al. (2014) explained that “humans are notoriously resistant to changing their longstanding beliefs and often act defensively when they encounter individuals holding divergent beliefs (p. 62). Conceptual Change
Theory (Posner, Strike, Hewson & Gertzog, 1982; Vosniadou, 2008)—a widely accepted construct that guides contemporary approaches to science pedagogy—confirms this perspective. In other words, until an individual’s existing cognitive schema prove unworkable, he or she maintains a staunch fidelity to the ways in which they have previously made sense of the world (Posner et al., 2008). This paradigmatic fidelity or
250 “worldview defense” (Van Tongeren et al., 2014, p. 62) provides at least a partial explanation for why the cards are stacked against the enactment of wide interdisciplinarity. What, then, might be the reason that some educators—including
Caren, Pam, Becky and Teresa—beat the odds, and cross boundaries to form a new paradigm? Van Tongeren et al. (2014) offer some insight into this question by discussing meaning-based humility, which they defined as “the down-regulation of egoistic motives in favor of other-orientedness, as well as an accurate view of oneself” (p. 63). They found that the enactment of humility can play a role in the reduction of worldview defensiveness, leading to the promotion of intergroup interactions. In answering my second research sub-question about the characteristics of ICDT participants who demonstrate an enduring commitment to arts-integration (i.e., Caren, Pam, Becky and
Teresa), I found that it was indeed the quality of humility, and its associated disposition of other-orientedness that united them, regardless of the different roles they played in the
ICDT.
Humility in the ICDT
Traditionally, humility has been discussed primarily in religious and moral terms, with common definitions including a “turning away from self and self-concern”
(Kellenberger, 2010, p. 333) and “not being proud, haughty or arrogant” (Kellenberger,
2010, p. 322). My data analysis revealed that these shared qualities of humility were both the catalyst that drove the group forward in its collaborative interdisciplinary inquiry and the glue that held it together over time. Each of my study participants could only perform their ICDT roles by being other-oriented. Penner and Finkelstein (1998) described other- orientedness as being fundamentally related to prosocial personalities and actions (i.e.,
251 those that benefit others, foster community, and engender collaboration). According to this definition, people who are other-oriented “have a tendency to experience empathy for, and to feel responsibility and concern above, the well being of others” (Penner &
Finkelstein, 1998, p. 526). This quality is an essential component of an individual’s ability to take the perspective of another, and this perspective taking, in turn, undergirds the reduction of human suffering and the actualization of social justice (Mooradian,
Davis & Matzler, 2011). In the case of the ICDT, my study’s participants all manifested other-orientedness through their efforts to perceive and honor the unfamiliar (to them) worldviews, ideologies and pedagogical approaches of arts educators, artists and, most importantly, the students in their classrooms whose ways of knowing were more art- than
STEM-oriented. For this reason, the participants’ other-orientedness provides a model for how other educators might actualize authentic differentiation (i.e., that which is grounded in curiosity about and respect for the learner’s worldview) to meet the needs of all learners in their classrooms. This, in turn, can help disrupt the institutionalized marginalization of those whose ways of knowing do not align with the positivistic approaches of the Western European rationalist tradition or that are prioritized by the neoliberal principles currently dominating the U.S. education system.
As the original ICDT member, Caren performed the critical role of the scout, willing to venture into a realm she did not know on behalf of the community. In order to do that, however, she had to first recognize that there was a different way of looking at and moving through the world in order for her to leverage her observational capacities in leading the ICDT across the boundary from other disciplines into the art terrain. Freire
(1998) noted that those who behave with arrogance are convinced that theirs is the only
252 truth and that it must be imposed on others. Caren, however, was able to scout truths that were different from the ones she knew, because she opened herself to the idea that there is more than one way of understanding the nature of “truth”. This is no small feat for an individual belonging to a professional Community of Practice (i.e., science education) that tends to focus on “discovering secrets of an already established natural world”
(Peters-Burton, 2014, p. 100) through positivisitic sense-making. While many science and STEM education scholars have long advocated for a better understanding of the
Nature of Science (including the ideas that science is not rigid or absolute, and it involves imagination and creativity), traditional, more absolutist views of the discipline still dominate many science classrooms (Lederman, 1999, 2006 & 2007; Allen, 2008).
Therefore, Caren had a good deal to lose (i.e., community membership) by deviating from the more positivistic epistemological norms and conventional methods employed by some of her colleagues. These norms stand in stark contrast to the more overtly pluralist epistemological orientation of the arts whereby multiple ways of knowing are definitional to art’s embrace of subjectivity. Once Caren perceived this epistemological difference during her initial art studio visits, she began a multi-year quest to uncover and explore multiple truths or “other ways of knowing”, as she was fond of saying. In this, her intellectual humility, risk-taking, and openness to learning other ways of making sense of the world provide an example for how others might resist and transgress the boundaries of official knowledge, mainstream conventions, and epistemological orthodoxy to benefit all students whose perspectives are marginalized.
Similarly, a cartographer cannot map the contours of a space that is unknown to her without having first perceived that there is something to be mapped. That perception
253 requires careful observation and a willingness to notate difference and to do so in relation to that which one already knows. This, in turn, necessitates advanced meta-cognitive capacities, including the ability to interrogate one’s own positionality. Whereas conventional mapping reifies assumptions and normative conventions embedded in dominant culture (in the case of the STEM-Art education inquiry, the dominant culture was that of STEM), Pam’s cartography shared a kinship with the genre of subversive, decolonizing mapping that has emerged more visibly during recent decades. With her strong commitment to the scientific community, the integrity with which she upheld scientific principles, and her desire to not develop a reputation for “fluff” or solipsism,
Pam worked tirelessly to help STEM stakeholders see the contours of art’s true nature as a medium for cultivating minds, expressing concepts, creating the self, and making possible a shared way of life (Eisner, 2002). Freire (1998) is helpful on this point as well, as he argued that “humility does not flourish in people’s insecurities but in the insecure security of the more aware, and thus this insecure security is one of the expressions of humility… ” (p. 73). Of the four research participants, Pam had the most to lose in terms of the integrity of her reputation for scientific rigor within the other (STEM)
Communities of Practice to which she belonged. For this reason, her foray into STEM-
Art integration and her willingness to so diligently document its territory reflects the uneasy tension of “insecure security” and this unusual dimension of humility. Her particular enactment of disciplinary humility provides another model for how a committed science teacher can engage with arts-based teaching and learning with a democratic mindset that honors the principles and practices of both disciplines and is arguably more authentic to them.
254 In considering how Becky’s enactment of STEM-Art integration and the role she played in the ICDT might inform teacher education more broadly, Freire (1998) has more to offer. He asked, “how can I listen to the other, how can I hold a dialogue, if I can only listen to myself, if I can only see myself, if nothing or no one other than myself can touch me or move me?” (p. 72). It is paradoxical to contemplate the idea of translation in the absence of difference. One cannot build bridges between the discourses of two paradigms if (1) one does not perceive that there is more than one paradigm, and (2) one does not commit to learning the discourse(s) of the paradigm that is different from one’s own.
Through her extraordinary perceptiveness about the nature of art and its intersections with the “big ideas” of mathematics, her fluency in cross-disciplinary metaphor making and her general excitement at linking to new (visual) forms of communication, Becky embodied the practice of listening and being moved by others.
For stakeholders attempting to support professional development communities in which educators become fluid disciplinary boundary crossers, the importance of listening as part of authentic dialogue cannot be overemphasized (Kinloch & San Pedro, 2014;
Kinloch, 2015a). More specifically, I argue that social justice- and equity-oriented dialogues must account for difference in power and privilege between members of heterogeneous groups. That accounting entails not just recognition of difference and the realization that the responsibility of listening is not always equally shared by all group members. Rather, the onus for careful, reflexive listening lies with members of the dominant group. This kind of listening is critically minded; it involves an unequivocal commitment to naming privilege and power and then disrupting it by taking a learning stance vis-à-vis individuals whose epistemological truths have been and continue to be
255 systematically “erased, storied over or replaced by dominant narratives” (San Pedro,
2015, pp. 133-34). Thus, this commitment to listening lies at the heart of equity-oriented interdisciplinary dialogic inquiry. Following this reasoning, Becky’s form of humility provides an exemplar for how members of dominant groups who enter the territories inhabited by members of marginalized groups can use the power of dialogue to transgress rather than reify epistemological inequity. Therefore, supporting equity- and, therefore, humility-infused, Communities of Practice (such as the ICDT) requires careful conversation facilitation which organizes the Communities’ activities in relation to the embodiment of multiple knowledges and ways of knowing.
In addition to linking humility to self-confidence, Freire (1998) discussed the connection between humility and courage. Of all my research participants, it was arguably Teresa who possessed the greatest courage when enacting her role as an interdisciplinary homesteader. Despite the fear that resulted from her prior negative experiences with art, Teresa tested the waters and made a long-term commitment to
STEM-Art interdisciplinary. This commitment grew from her decision to place the needs of her students before her own comfort. To further this goal, she marshaled resources that could sustain arts integration in her classroom, and she extended the ICDT Community of
Practice to her school building colleagues and student teachers. In so doing, she provided an exemplar for other-orientedness and, therefore, homesteading with humility. The implications related to this set of findings are directly related to resource availability. The risk of presenting Teresa as an exemplar in STEM-Art integration homesteading is that her remarkable resourcefulness could be appropriated through a colonizing mentality that would force those working in under-funded fields to be exploited. Any disciplinary
256 integration that refuses to trouble and disrupt the under-funding of one discipline to the benefit of the dominant discipline(s) constitutes the perpetuation of neoliberal exploitation rather than democratic engagement. Thus, systemic approaches to equity- oriented interdisciplinarity require the fair distribution of resources. A fair distribution accounts for the fact that members of differing disciplinary communities are not equally situated in relation to resource procurement.
Democratic Engagements Beyond the ICDT
As I explained in the preceding section, each of the four research participants in this dissertation study embodied the practice of humility, albeit in various manners. Their disciplinary humility was enacted in terms of how they took up their roles in the ICDT, which was, at its core, the practice of perspective-taking and other-orientedness. In sharing this particular disposition, Caren, Pam, Becky and Teresa all demonstrated its utility as well as the pluralist possibilities of its enactment within the context of substantive STEM-Art integration. As a result, their humility dispositions both fostered and reified their commitments to substantive STEM-Art integration. Like STEM-Art integration, humility as a disposition is a multi-dimensional phenomenon that requires further research and theorizing (Van Tongeren et al., 2014). Theorizing the role of humility within interdisciplinary endeavors thus holds the potential to contribute to knowledge within both under-researched realms. In recent scholarship pertaining to humility, there is one area of particularly promise for expanding critical perspectives on interdisciplinary Communities of Practice and for informing social justice education more broadly. In this, I am referring to the concept of “cultural humility.”
257 Cultural Humility: Toward a New Theory of Interdisciplinary Teaching and Learning
In 1998, Dr. Melanie Tervalon, a pediatrician practicing at Children’s Hospital in
Oakland, California, and Dr. Jann Murray-García, a pediatric resident at the same hospital, articulated the concept of “cultural humility” as an alternative to the “cultural competency” construct that pervaded multicultural approaches to clinical care for the poor and underserved at the time. They defined cultural humility as “a lifelong commitment to self- evaluation and self-critique, to redressing the power imbalances in the patient-physician dynamic, and to developing mutually beneficial and nonpaternalistic clinical and advocacy partnerships with communities on behalf of individuals and defined populations” (Tervalon
& Murray-García, 1998, p. 117). Cultural competence, by contrast, was described as a
“detached mastery of a theoretically finite body of knowledge” (p. 117).
In the years since Tervalon and Murray-García articulated this important distinction, the construct of cultural humility as a counterhegemonic tool has not been fully realized.
While it has made important inroads in the education of medical professionals, social workers and psychologists, a search in the Web of Science database for Tervalon and
Murray-García’s 1998 article returns only 297 citations. Moreover, those citations are found predominantly in healthcare-related journals and books (I have included social work and psychology in this category). A handful of citations are found in the fields of public policy and administration, organizational leadership and environmental studies. There are no references to cultural humility in relation to interdisciplinary thinking, teaching, or learning or to teacher education. Yet the concept of cultural humility has enormous implications for these domains. Those implications are discussed in the following sections.
258 From Miracle to Method
Sill (2001) used a cartoon by Harris (1977) to illustrate the stubborn elusiveness of actualizing consistent, rigorous interdisciplinary teaching and learning (see Figure 30).
Figure 29. Visualization of a Missing Piece Within Interdisciplinary Theories
Addressing the “miracle” of interdisciplinarity by developing a methodological approach to rigorous and substantive arts-integration was, in fact, the mission of the
ICDT. How science and mathematics teachers grappled with the ambiguity of interdisciplinary gaps or spaces was the subject of this dissertation study. To answer my research question of how secondary teachers of science and mathematics might adopt substantive approaches in their teaching practices, I relied on the history of interdisciplinary scholarship and adopted a sociocultural perspective to conceptualize my study participants’ disciplinary boarder crossing as a cross-cultural endeavor. Drawing on
Pratt (1991), I explained that when individuals of differing disciplinary orientations enter
259 into a shared space of inquiry, that space becomes a paradigmatic contact zone wherein meaning is contested and negotiated relative to the disciplinary affiliations of the participants. The manner in which that meaning is negotiated determines the degree to which integration can occur. This, in turn, determines the degree to which the interdisciplinarity is both rigorous and social justice oriented. Because I found that
Caren, Pam, Becky and Teresa negotiated the space of STEM-Art integration with humility vis-à-vis disciplinary and interdisciplinary cultures, the concept of cultural humility answers the fundamental question of how the study participants enacted authentic, collaborative, and wide interdisciplinarity. Therefore, I propose that cultural humility is the “miracle”, or the missing piece, that fills the gap at the heart of my initial conceptual framework (Figure 31).
Figure 30. Conceptual Framework for the Enactment of Interdisciplinary Teaching and Learning
260 This framework is intended as a theory of action (Parsons, 1937) for interdisciplinary teaching and learning. Sociological theories of action highlight both the cultural and agentive dimensions of human behavior and, as such, are well-aligned with multiperspectival paradigms that embrace individual subjectivity as well as the emancipatory agenda of critical perspective (Horkheimer, 1972). Therefore, this dissertation’s conceptual framework, with cultural humility as its core, has the potential to lead directly into the development of rigorous, equity-oriented pedagogical methodologies for teaching through STEM-Art integration. This implication is related to my first research sub-question in which I asked what influenced Caren, Pam, Becky and
Teresa to explore arts integration in their middle and high school-level classrooms.
Therefore, in addition to understanding cultural humility as a characteristic of successful
STEM-Art integrationists, it is necessary to understand how exactly cultural humility was catalyzed and actualized within the ICDT context. Because I have extended the concept of cultural humility as it was originally defined by Tervalon and Murray-García (1998), their criteria serve as an important point of departure for developing a methodological approach to putting my conceptual framework into action. In preparing educators to teach for interdisciplinary understanding, those criteria would include (1) a commitment to engaging in reflexivity, (2) the interrogation and disruption of power imbalances between disciplinary worldviews, and (3) ascertaining that the integration effort equitably supports, rather than undermines, the advancement of knowledge in all domains. In the following sections, I explain why it is difficult to meet those criteria and suggest strategies for overcoming barriers to their actualization.
261 The miracle model: Assumptions and implications. It would easy (and problematic) to argue that only very special people are capable of enacting cultural humility, as it is obvious that cultural humility does not come naturally to everyone and is it not always valued in society. The most obvious contemporary confirmation of this assertion is the utter lack of humility exhibited by the current Republican presidential frontrunner candidate, Donald Trump. This lack of humility is enthusiastically embraced by frighteningly large numbers of ardent Trump supporters who revel in an old world order that reifies a conservative agenda anchored in patriarchal white privilege and entitlement. It is self-evident that there will always be individuals whose narcissistic tendencies stack the cards against cultural humility, making its enactment miraculous in many contexts where the normative values of hegemonic forces prevail. The miracle model for cultural humility accepts the status quo and relies on those chance occurrences when individuals who are other-oriented engage with others of similar dispositions. Thus, this model is entirely dependent on ideal people with ideal dispositions being in the same place, at the same time, with ideal circumstances that leverage their cultural humility. As a result, the presence of cultural humility as an essential feature within a Community of
Practice can never be more than an extraordinary, unpredictable, idiosyncratic, and
“miraculous” event. Anything else claiming to be a community grounded in cultural humility would have to be considered misguided at best and deceitful at worst.
The method model: A systems approach. The ICDT (and Project ASPIRE as a whole) was established on the premise that rigorous methodologies could be developed for the innovative practices that would emerge from the program, including the ICDT’s approach to STEM-Art integration. Locating cultural humility as a central feature of the
262 ICDT’s approach requires an understanding of how this disposition can be intentionally fostered and woven into any STEM-Art methodology associated with Project ASPIRE.
Hence, deriving a methodological approach to cultural humility out of the ICDT context is one of the most significant outcomes of this dissertation study. That methodological approach provides a pathway for people to engage in cultural humility as a learned practice, rather than an inconsistent, idiosyncratic event.
One of the most important features of the method model for cultural humility aligns with a social justice perspective: the development of critical consciousness. For individuals to enact and increase their cultural humility dispositions, they must shift from worldview defensiveness to other-orientedness, which enhances their perspective taking capacities. This shift is difficult to achieve without a commitment to reflexivity and critical consciousness, because it entails perceiving and pushing beyond one’s assumptions about the way the world works. This is difficult to actualize, because assumptions reify dispositions, which, in turn, function as deeply embodied, tacit processes. Those processes are comprised of a complex, synchronous set of interrelations between an individual’s affective, motivational, behavioral and information-processing repertoires (Beck & Dozois, 2011). According to Beck and Dozois (2011), dispositions are tantamount to automatic thoughts, or “the stream of positive and negative thoughts that run through an individual’s mind unaccompanied by direct, conscious deliberation.”
They continued,
Although such thoughts are more specific and proximal to a given situation than are other levels of cognition, they are functionally related to one’s deeper beliefs and schemas and seem to arise associatively as different aspects of one’s core belief system are activated (p. 399).
263 This perspective on individual cognition and sense-making implies that while dispositional shifting—including from worldview defensiveness to other-orientedness— is difficult to achieve, it can be cultivated. The implication of this perspective is that cultural humility be developed in some individuals through reflexivity and critical thinking, which lays the groundwork for an approach that is systematic rather than idiosyncratic. The implications of Caren, Pam, Becky and Teresa all leveraging other- orientedness and avoiding worldview defensiveness within the ICDT, are that the features of the ICDT context provide the foundation for a systems approach to cultural humility.
Environments characterized by cultural humility. The ICDT environment was determined by two main factors: the selection of participants and the strategies that were employed to structure the group’s activities. Each of these factors is discussed below.
Selection. As I mentioned above, not everyone possesses an other-oriented disposition, nor is every worldview-defensive person likely to develop robust attitudes and practices that could be considered as culturally humility. However, Hepper, Hart and
Sedikides (2014) found that even individuals with observable narcissistic tendencies have the capacity to become more empathetic and, therefore, more other oriented “given the right conditions” (p. 1090). While this finding is encouraging, there are indeed some individuals whose cognitive structures become so rigid that a shift to other-orientedness becomes impossible. Moreover, such individuals may perceive cultural humility-centered contexts to threaten their worldview, which in turn, threatens their identity and their in- group status vis-à-vis their paradigmatic kin. Such individuals are likely to select themselves out of cultural humility-inducing situations (Davis et al., 1999; Pancer, 1988;
Zaki, 2014; Schumann et al., 2014). Therefore, the first step in creating environments that
264 foster a Community of Practice centered on cultural humility is the selection of participants based on their dispositional qualities and capacities.
In the context of Project ASPIRE, cooperating teachers (including the four research participants in this dissertation study) were selected through a two-tiered process. The first of these tiers was self-selection. In its first year of operation, Project
ASPIRE was widely advertised throughout the partner school district, with posters, flyers and email blasts collaboratively generated by the university and district. Those marketing materials sought cooperating teachers interested in mentoring a new generation of urban educators. Caren, Pam, Becky and Teresa all responded to this call, and they all shared an initial desire to both engage in the opportunity for professional growth and to earn the stipends which were provided by the program to all cooperating teachers. Next, interested teachers were required to submit applications containing their work history, descriptions of their teaching philosophy and approach to mentoring pre-service teachers, and their experiences using culturally relevant teaching strategies, meeting the needs of all learners, and forming relationships with students in their classrooms. Once the university and district administrators vetted the applications, prospective cooperating teacher candidates, including the ICDT participants, were chosen for interviews. As was consistent with the collaborative nature of Project ASPIRE, all interviews were conducted by a team of university and district program administrators who made the final selection of participants together, based on the applications and interviews through which the teachers’ commitments to social justice, equity and diversity were assessed. This commitment to selecting candidates based on their social-justice orientations (and/or their capacities therefor) was synchronized with the selection of M.Ed. pre-service program
265 candidates. All four of this dissertation study’s participants were selected (and self- selected) in this manner.
The assessment of participant dispositions in order to determine participation in institutionally supported interdisciplinary Communities of Practice is not without complications. In fact, disposition assessment is the subject of extensive debate, however, within teacher education, the practice is nothing new (Helm, 2006). In fact, any candidate seeking certification through an approved National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) program must undergo a performance-based assessment of knowledge, skills and dispositions. NCATE (2002) defines dispositions as follows:
the values, commitments, and professional ethics that influence behaviors towards students, families, colleagues, and communities, and affect student learning, motivation, and development as well as the educator’s own professional development. Dispositions are guided by beliefs and attitudes related to values such as caring, fairness, honest, responsibility and social justice (p. 53).
In alignment with the NCATE stance, participants with a predisposition for other- orientedness should be selected for rigorous, institutionally supported interdisciplinary endeavors, and then strategies should be employed to create the conditions whereby the values underlying cultural humility are activated and leveraged.
Strategies. In this section, I identify strategies employed in Project ASPIRE’s
ICDT which created the conditions where Caren, Pam, Becky and Teresa exhibited and leveraged their cultural humility dispositions. As Zaki (2014) explained in relation to empathy, context and the display of a disposition are deeply linked. Therefore, a shifting disposition can be understood as a motivated phenomenon that occurs as a change process
(Miller & Rollnick, 2012). This means that in any given context, a person’s decision to
266 enact a disposition or, conversely, to avoid it is part of a complex, internal decision matrix. That matrix incudes the individual’s self-awareness in relation to the disposition, his or her degree of ambivalence versus resolution regarding a dispositional shift, and a range of contextual factors such as the individual’s rapport with other participant’s in the setting (Miller & Rollick, 2012). While a thorough inquiry into the details of the ICDT context and their implications are beyond the scope of this dissertation study, a summary of the strategies that were employed to shape the context can provide clues as to the conditions that fostered and leveraged the cultural humility dispositions of the study participants and contributed to their transformative exploration of arts integration. This summary begins fittingly with an excerpt from a curatorial statement written by Caren at the end of her fourth year of participation. She described the ICDT context in the following manner:
Creating a community of trust especially among veteran teachers in an urban culture, with educators of different disciplines, gathered together to create innovative curriculum is no small task. [The ICDT structure] was so carefully and purposefully created, allowing for each of us to feel safe and supported to explore new mediums, new ways of thinking, connecting and collaborating.
The key ideas Caren presented in this statement were the importance of community, trust, collaboration, creative production, safety, exploration, and learning. These were all themes that she referred to again and again throughout her data set, as did the other three participants to varying degrees. For instance, of these seven components, Pam’s descriptions of the ICDT environment focused primarily on collaboration, exploration and learning. However, like Caren, she also emphasized visits to the art studio and described the importance of the “warm and welcoming atmosphere” and its relationship
267 to her willingness to try art making. The dimension of safety was less prevalent in
Becky’s data set; however, the themes of community, collaboration, creative production, exploration and learning were obvious and abundant. In this, Becky’s descriptions of the
ICDT context were very closely aligned with those of Caren. For Teresa, the ICDT context represented an opportunity to learn and explore. For her, those opportunities came through collaboration with artists whose content expertise made her feel safe (see
Chapter 4). To return to Caren’s above statement, the ICDT environment was indeed created with the deliberate intention to produce all of the qualities the participants highlighted. Some of those strategies included:
1. The establishment of a shared mission and a purpose larger than any one individual’s agenda (i.e., supporting urban students by supporting future urban educators);
2. Leveraging, honoring and respecting each participant’s expertise through collaborative design inquiry;
3. Building relationships through a rotating meeting location schedule whereby each participant had a chance to host and showcase her/his classroom “home”;
4. Fostering risk-taking and perspective-taking through immersive studio art experiences that took place far beyond the boundaries of the university and district locations, and within a beautiful, natural setting;
5. Rejecting traditional top-down, hierarchical approaches to professional development in favor of a facilitated co-creative, iterative inquiry process;
6. Expressing care and appreciation for the ICDT participants by providing plentiful, high quality food and drinks during off-site meetings, whole-group meetings, happy hours and restaurant gatherings;
7. Respecting the integrity of participants and the longitudinal nature of change process by adopting an incubating approach which gave the group freedom and space to explore, develop and synthesize ideas of a multi-year timeframe;
268 8. Providing the group with access to resources in the form of dedicated arts-based collaborators for extensive co-planning and co-teaching as well as authentic, high quality art materials and supplies;
9. Acknowledging and responding to the extra workload ICDT members incurred by providing arts educators who took on the responsibility for sourcing and preparing all materials needed for in-class prototyping; and
10. Celebrating the successes of participants and their students through public exhibitions of the STEM-Art integrated artworks and other associated evidence of student learning.
While further research is needed on the impact of these strategies on the ICDT environment and on disciplinary cultural humility, the strategies provide an exemplar that can be adapted to suit the exigencies and characteristics of other contexts. Rather than a fixed or static recipe for cultural humility, the ICDT structure offers a set of landmarks that hold promise for other organizations or groups of individuals seeking to catalyze cultural humility dispositions through a systematic, consistent approach.
Broader Implications for Teacher Education
This dissertation study and the ICDT Community of Practice were part of Project
ASPIRE, which created a national model for urban teacher preparation. That model was, in turn, part of a larger education reform initiative created by the U.S. Department of
Education to address the shortage of highly qualified teachers in schools within high-need districts, thereby improving student outcomes. Within the specifications of its funding priorities, the Department of Education recognized the fact that historically marginalized student populations are chronically underserved and tend to be concentrated in urban and rural areas. An implicit goal of the Department of Education’s initiative was to reduce the ever-widening achievement gap between students belonging to historically (and
269 currently) marginalized groups and those of higher socio-economic status. That gap directly correlates to students’ race and class background.
Noguera (2010) argued that public schools normalize the failure of students of color and in so doing, fall into an uncritical complacency that pervades the American education system. Gutiérrez (2008) warned that focusing on achievement gaps is inherently deficit-oriented, ignoring the knowledge, skills and rich cultural resources that marginalized students bring to their classrooms. She suggested that equity-oriented scholars should adopt an anti “gap-gazing” lens. This stance requires researchers to focus on what exactly constitutes academic excellence, including, but not limited to, demonstrating understanding in multiple modalities and high performance on assessments (Gutiérrez, 1996, 2007, 2008; Gutstein, 2006; Education Trust, 2005).
Adopting an anti gap-gazing lens can be actualized through asset pedagogies
(Ladson-Billings, 1995, 2014; Nieto, 1999, 2004; Gay, 2000; Paris, 2012; Paris & Alim,
2014). The most well-known of these approaches is Culturally Relevant Pedagogy (CRP)
(Ladson-Billings, 1995). Paris (2012) suggested that CRP be reframed as Culturally
Sustaining Pedagogy, which he argued was more pluralistic and responsive to the languages, literacies, and other cultural practices of historically marginalized communities. He argued that as a pedagogy, CSP “seeks to perpetuate and foster—to sustain—linguistic, literate, and cultural pluralism as part of the democratic project of schooling.” He further contended that in order to resist current educational efforts that privilege “a monocultural and monolingual society, research and practice need equally explicit resistances that embrace cultural pluralism and cultural equality” (p. 93).
270 My intent in including the concept of cultural humility in my conceptual framework is not only to extend theories of STEM-Art integration specifically and interdisciplinarity generally, but also to introduce cultural humility into the discourse of teacher education. In this way, cultural humility expands the terrain of asset pedagogies and provides another important strategy for all educators committed to the enactment of equity, diversity, and social justice-oriented policies and practices. The inclusion of cultural humility in the cadre of asset pedagogies is particularly important for teacher education given the fact that white middle class females still comprise the vast majority of the United States teaching force, including in many urban schools where their cultural identities do not match the identities of most of their students. Arguably, teachers’ abilities to enact culturally relevant and culturally sustaining pedagogy in classrooms comprised primarily of non-white students is entirely dependent on the teachers’ cultural humility dispositions. This is particularly true in the STEM disciplines where research has shown that white teachers at the secondary level consistently struggle to enact CRP and CSP, primarily due to positivistic norms that were (are) constructed within an epistemology of slippery white privilege (Calabrese Barton, 2001; Moore, 2008; Johnson,
2011). The power of my conceptual framework, a method model for interdisciplinarity, and the ICDT lies in their capacity to provide a workable example of teacher practice transformed through a successful, anti-colonizing, equity-oriented approach to moving through territories of power, privilege and difference.
Limitations and Cautions
“Metaphors are serious things” (Hall, 1992).
271 As with all studies, there are many possible limitations to my dissertation study.
Whereas the strength of my study lies in my insider status within the ICDT Community of Practice, this could also be a weakness. As we together created a shared culture about arts integration, our understandings, discourses and practices became normalized within our group. As Glesne (1991) explained, the challenge in this context is to make the strange familiar and the familiar strange. The difficulties involved in negotiating the insider-outsider tension inherent in ethnographic, participatory research can be daunting and can undermine a study’s reliability.
One possible manifestation of this limitation in my dissertation study is the friendships I formed with my study participants through our five-year collaboration. It is likely that there were instances where Caren, Pam, Becky and/or Teresa made choices about what they shared in interviews and focus groups so as not to hurt my feelings, particularly since I was the facilitator of the ICDT. I suspect that they were, at times, hesitant to share any blatant criticisms they might have had of my facilitation capacities.
On the other hand, our friendship generated rich data. Each of the research participants was enormously generous with their time in answering my many questions as well as with spending time reflecting and brainstorming with me over the years. Moreover, they all undoubtedly shared more than they might have otherwise because of the relationship of trust and mutual respect that developed among us.
Another, potentially and more serious limitation to this dissertation study relates to validity and the choices I made in my data analysis. Addressing this validity threat requires me to revisit my use of slippery white metaphors. Bhabha (2015) argued that
“hegemony is an on-going process of the calibration of strategy and the calculation of the
272 (in)balance of forces” (p. 23) That calibration happens in moments of transition, when the past becomes inscribed in the future in novel ways. Metaphors are a fundamentally important tool in how the past and future are negotiated within those transitional moments. Hall (1993) explained:
[Metaphors of transformation] allow us to imagine what it would be like when prevailing cultural values are challenged and transformed, the old social hierarchies are overthrown, old standards and norms disappear or are consumed in the ‘festival of revolution’, and new meanings and values, social and cultural configurations, begin to appear (p. 286).
He argued that such metaphors of transformation “must also have an analytic value. They must somehow provide ways of thinking about the social and symbolic domains in this process of transformation” (p. 286) Hall cautioned, however, that these ways of thinking are not simple binaries or the rejection of one meaning for its opposite.
Rather, their transformative power lies in plurality of their inscriptional possibilities.
Bhabha (2015) further theorized this idea, explaining that “historical change often dawns as a suspension of time between contingent concepts and conjunctures” (p. 24). He argued that the negotiation of meaning within that liminal space involves “acrobatic maneuvers of time walking the tightrope of transition”.
In Chapter 4, I used metaphors to build models to explain how STEM-Art interdisciplinarity could be enacted in ways that were counterhegemonic. I argued that it was possible for me, a white woman, to participate in a “disarticulation and rearticulation” (Hall, 1993, p. 295) of the metaphors I chose to describe the movements of Caren, Pam, Becky and Teresa within a territory that had previously been unfamiliar to them. It is a distinct possibility that as a white woman whose study participants were also
273 all white women, I have undermined my social justice agenda by attempting to use and critique the discourses of colonization as a way to de-territorialize interdisciplinarity. I have made clear my awareness that there are inherent complications in using the language of the colonizer to conceptualize movement through different territories and spaces. As is the case with successful STEM-Art interdisciplinarity, the cards are stacked against the successful (i.e., anti-colonialist) enactment of linguistic reappropriation by members of colonizing groups (such as myself). Perhaps the greatest barrier to success in this endeavor is the slipperiness of whiteness and the associated likelihood that I have failed to perceive, name and disrupt all of the ways that white privilege has shaped my own meaning-making processes. However, in proposing that cultural humility lies at the center of successful multi-cultural (including interdisciplinary) collaborations, I have attempted to follow Hall’s (1993) theory of articulation and provide a new ideological accenting within the metaphors of the United States frontier. As Hall (1993) explained,
you need to know the ideological terrain, the lay of the land. But that’s not to say, ‘that’s how it is, so it always will be so’. Of course, if you are going to try to break, contest or interrupt some of these tendential historical connections, you have to know when you are moving against the grain of historical formations (Hall, 1993, p. 143).
This engagement with the past, particularly a past that has been valorized through popular culture, is necessary to transformation. However, the engagement I choose required me to negotiate the space between past and present by walking a linguistic and ideological tightrope that was, as Hall (1993) put it “suspended between metaphors” (p.
299) across the liminal space of possibility (Bhabha, 2015). While that space undeniably contains the danger of reifying the colonialist agenda, it has been my attempt to find a equity-oriented pathway that helps members of dominant groups think more critically
274 about how they pass through territories that, while new to them, are the home of other people. In so doing, I argue that any attempts by members of dominant groups to use the slippery tools of domination to enact counterhegemonic, systemic change can only succeed through the enactment of cultural humility.
Cultural humility presents a new kind of gap-closing measure that gets to the heart of the real deficit in U.S public schooling: systemic failure to enact education as a democratic enterprise. In a recent publication, Emdin (2016) argued that without bridging the “vast divide” (p. 2) between the cultures of students of color and officially sanctioned curricula and pedagogy, educators are complicit in perpetuating the long-standing systemic injustices that violate students’ right to equity in education. In laying out an anti-assimilationist vision for education that vigorously disrupts white privilege, he asked
“what new frameworks or lenses can we use to bring white folks who teach in the hood to consider that urban education is more complex than saving students and being a hero” (p.
7)? Cultural humility as a pedagogical approach offers one such framework, particularly within the current urban education landscape. In that landscape, the teacher workforce remains predominantly white, female, and middle-class whereas the student population is comprised largely of youth of color whose rich cultural knowledge is silenced by traditional school content and norms. Overcoming this pernicious gap without further reinforcing the divide requires bridging the gap between cultural differences. Yet as
Emdin (2016) pointed out:
the brilliance of neoindigenous youth cannot be appreciated by educators who are conditioned to perceive anything outside their own ways of knowing and being as not having value. (p. 11)
275 A cultural humility framework both implicitly and explicitly requires acknowledgement of cultural difference that must precede the kind of gap-closing Emdin (2016) champions.
In helping white educators become effective learners about their non-white students’ communities, as Emdin (2016) urges, cultural humility is fundamentally linked to a
Freirian, democratic conceptualization of the nature and purpose of education in society.
In this way, it has at its core an ethical, moral stance, and from this perspective, it is arguably an important tool for upholding the rule of law at the national and international levels.
While the United States Constitution offers no statutory guarantee of the right to education per se, it was crafted to protect unalienable human rights (such as liberty) described in the United States Declaration of Independence (Second Continental
Congress, 1776). Moreover, the United States is a charter member of the United Nations
(UN), which, in Article 26.2 of its 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights stated that “education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect of human rights and fundamental freedoms” (UN, 1948).
This perspective was emphasized through the UN’s specialized agency, the United
Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). In the Preamble to its Constitution, UNESCO states, “that the wide diffusion of culture, and the education of humanity for justice and liberty and peace are indispensable to the dignity of man and constitute a sacred duty which all the nations must fulfill in a spirit of mutual assistance and concern” (UNESCO, 1946). As distinguished scholars—particularly those in the critical tradition (e.g., Freire, 1970/2000; Ladson-Billings, 1999; Giroux, 2001)—have argued, an education system which fails to honor the diverse cultural knowledges and
276 practices of historically marginalized people continues to violate the democratic principles outlined in the aforementioned national and international governing documents. And, as Giroux (2016) recently emphasized in an article excoriating the dominant market-driven ideologies that shape U.S. education policy, critically-minded educators (i.e., those enacting Freire’s [1970/2000] conscientizacao) are important in actualizing a system of education that protects human rights by functioning as a
“laboratory for democracy” rather than a neoliberal agenda (http://www.truth- out.org/opinion/item/35970-why-teachers-matter-in-dark-times).
Thus, the notion of cultural humility holds great promise not only in the domains of STEM-Art integration and interdisciplinary teacher education, but also for advancing social justice education that authentically honors all learners in a manner consistent with the tenets of human rights and democracy. To fully leverage its potential as an asset pedagogy, additional inquiry is needed to more rigorously and fully theorize the nature and purpose of cultural humility in education. Because I propose cultural humility as a theory of critical action, operationalizing the concept into practice is of central importance. In closing, it is necessary for me to make one final attempt to combat slippery whiteness. That is, I wish to be abundantly clear that for as long as we continue to live in an inequitable society that privileges one group over another, the onus of enacting authentic cultural humility lies unquestionably on the shoulder of the oppressor and not of the oppressed.
277
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