This study explores a school-based participatory action research (PAR) project in Iceland aimed at fostering transformative change towards equity inclusion. The project was conducted in a collaborative partnership between the school community and university researchers, who assumed the role of facilitators. The research built on the active collaboration of children and adults, emphasising children´s active participation and involvement in the process. The external facilitators critically examined their role and influence as well as the relationships they formed with the school community through various activities with children, school personnel, and administrators during the project. The data for this study was drawn from the facilitators’ research journals and reflective dialogue between facilitators and participants.

Findings indicate that the external facilitators provided valuable impulses for internal development, helping to ignite and guide the school’s transformation processes. Simultaneously, facilitators gained deep insights into the school´s internal workings, enhancing their understanding of inclusion and democratic practices. The research revealed supportive factors for inclusion and equity embedded in the school’s culture, policies, and practices, such as a strong sense of community, supportive leadership, flexible practices, and inclusive policies, which were further strengthened as children and adults actively identified and enhanced them.

The study highlights the essential role of collaborative partnerships between external researchers and school communities in driving inclusive school development. By integrating external expertise with internal knowledge and experiences, the research demonstrates how such dynamic collaborations can effectively support schools in achieving their inclusion goals. This project underscores the importance of fostering equity and inclusion through collaborative, participatory, action-oriented research, emphasising the mutual benefits of partnerships for transformative educational change.

Research aim

This self-study focuses on teaching #MeToo in graduate courses on critical feminist pedagogies. I ask, what can we learn from teacher candidates as well as high school students what the role of #MeToo is in English teacher education?

I examine one masters student’s initial discomfort about addressing #MeToo in the secondary English classroom. Using portraiture (Lawrence-Lightfoot & Hoffman Davis, 1997), I trace this student’s initial reluctance to the moments where she challenged her own assumptions. I examine both my student’s writing as well as integrate my own self-reflexive account of #MeToo activism with high school students. This activism informs my current commitment to addressing sexual harassment in teacher education curricula, particularly for English and critical literacy teachers.

Theoretical framework and methods

Throughout this portrait, I use Ahmed’s concept of “complaint as feminist pedagogy” (2021). Ahmed argues that in making a complaint against sexual violence, students and faculty come up against institutional “walls” that silence and surveil. Even so, the complaint activism (Ahmed, 2021) that students and faculty engage in also have implications for curriculum and pedagogy.

I draw from Ahmed’s “complaint as feminist pedagogy” to analyze my student’s complaint that resisted and then embraced addressing sexual violence in schools. I also analyze my experiences as a teacher-activist who engaged in #MeToo activism with my former high school students.

Findings

By initially making a complaint about my feminist curriculum, one teacher candidate comes to realize that the real complaint must be made against schools and institutions that silence women and girls from speaking out about harassment, not about the curricula that are designed to provide spaces for feminist pedagogy and activism in schools.

Relevance to the conference theme and specific strand

Equity and inclusion; social justice; reconciling tensions in teacher education. S-STEP strand; equity and inclusion; subject specific (English) strands.

Prevailing notions of scholarship in the academy position the work of faculty within the three general categories of teaching, research, and service. In terms of promotion and tenure across the ranks of assistant to full professorship, a cohesive agenda that links faculty research and teaching is expected, particularly in teacher education where research and teaching are co-constitutive. However, service is often an additional requirement that carries little weight in faculty evaluations. What faculty members do for service is often marginalized within the traditional power structures of the institution and, thus, faculty receive few resources (e.g., funding, mentoring) that support development in service positions. This exclusion is particularly problematic for faculty engaged in service that centers their social identities.This self-study, conducted jointly with a critical friend, draws on social identity theory and Archeology of the Self to examine one faculty member’s experiences navigating the tensions between her social identities and expected academic identities in relation to service work.Findings unpack how the specific context of the academy shaped how the focal faculty member worked to reconcile tensions between social and academic identities and in relation to the degree to which those identities were visible and/or invisible in service work. As a faculty member who centered the social identities of students in teaching, this reconciliation led to a (re)imagining of instructional practices supporting preservice teachers’ thinking about the relationship between their identities and instructional decision-making. Understanding how social identities visible in faculty work beyond teaching and research shape faculty agendas can more fully acknowledge and value who faculty are in relation to their whole selves, thus contributing to the construction of a new social contract in education that (re)envisions how faculty identities shape teaching practices within academic institutions.

In this self-study, we employed a critical appreciative inquiry process in teacher education to examine the creation of a research-practice partnership (RPP) with the purpose of increasing mainstream classroom teachers’ sense of preparedness to support a growing number of multilingual learners and their families. We focused on constructive and deconstructive forms of inquiry to reflect on our learning as teacher educators at the boundaries of research and practice within an RPP that centered the strengths and assets of educators, students, and families from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds (Ridley-Duff & Duncan, 2015). RPPs have the potential to further university-school collaborations by creating hybrid spaces to support teacher development when incorporated in teacher education (Sato & Loewen, 2022). In this self-study, we explored how teacher educators negotiated tensions between their beliefs, values, pedagogical practices, and the demands on and of their school-based partners. By reflecting on our data through a critical appreciative lens (e.g., teacher educator reflections, ongoing dialogues with the school-based team, planning for and debriefing of teacher professional learning), we cultivated a deeper understanding of culturally and linguistically responsive practices as they apply to both teacher education and PK-12 instruction in the United States. Focusing on learning at the intersection of research and practice for teacher educators (Farrell et al., 2022), we demonstrate how RPPs can disrupt dominant narratives that a) often portray teachers as passive recipients of external expert knowledge and b) vilify the values and cultures of students and families from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds given the deficient-based perspectives they tend to promote. This study underscores the importance for teacher education institutions, as communities of practice, to acknowledge the critical acts and tensions that must be negotiated in order to truly center the collective experiences and varying expertise of its members when establishing research-practice partnerships.

To offer quality teaching, teachers need specialized knowledge about sensing the effectiveness of their teaching in specific contexts, as well as the ability to improve it independently. This implies that prospective teachers should learn to establish personal criteria for effective teaching in various settings—differing from class to class, and from student to student—while being motivated to engage in lifelong learning throughout their professional careers, beginning during their pre-service training.

This type of knowledge is not something that can be simply taught; rather, it is constructed by students through reflection on their studies and practicum at university, and integrating these learnings and experiences within themselves. Two major challenges arise in this process. The first is theoretical: it involves clarifying the nature of knowledge that can adapt appropriately to individual contexts. While this may resemble wisdom, existing research suggests that professional wisdom is not attainable by everyone. Therefore, a "middle-range" wisdom, which provides adaptable knowledge suited to specific contexts, should be explored. The second challenge is practical: it concerns understanding how prospective teachers develop such knowledge, and how teacher educators can facilitate this development.

To address these challenges, this study employs a self-study approach, in which the researcher supports a student teacher conducting action research on his own process of professional identity formation through his practicum as a mathematics teacher at junior high school. Although the researcher is his supervisor at the professional development school of Hiroshima University in Japan, she also acts as a critical friend in guiding his action research, while receiving advice from colleagues who serve as her critical friends in the field of mathematics. The research takes place from April 2024 to February 2026, corresponding with the student teacher’s action research, and intermediate findings will be presented at the conference in July 2025.