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Session------ 8.11 - Symposium (#166) - Problematizing Professional Tensions in Teacher Education
Time:
Friday, 04/July/2025:
8:50am - 10:30am
Location:WMS - Hugh Fraser
Capacity: 40; 9 media tables
Presentations
Problematizing Professional Tensions in Teacher Education
Melanie Shoffner, Kristina J. Doubet, Angela W. Webb
James Madison University, United States of America
We are three teacher educators operating in contexts that push against the things we value: educational equity, professional autonomy, personal well-being. We turn to self-study to examine the tensions we face individually, coming together in this presentation to consider how our personal attitudes toward teaching are problematized by the tensions we face in our professional capacities.
This work is grounded in our professional commitment to implementing and advocating for learner-centered pedagogies (e.g., Gay, 2018; Noddings, 2012) and educational equity (e.g., Hammond, 2014; Love, 2019). Our perspectives are frequently at odds with the positioning of education as a commodity, which pushes against these beliefs.
These three separate explorations use self-study methodology to collectively examine our experiences. Through reflective journaling, artifact analysis, and critical friends meetings, we consider our problems of practice, how those problems inform our teaching, and how our expectations are realized or disappointed. We will meet monthly in Fall 2024 to discuss interpretations of the ongoing data analysis, with studies concluded in Spring 2025.
Author 1 explores the situated tension of working in a higher education context that privileges measurable outcomes over personal connections and caring interactions that she values as necessary for meaningful learning.
Author 2 explores the tensions of advocating for progressive teaching practices her students perceive as unimportant despite her successful professional-development partnerships with diverse schools.
Author 3 explores the tension of navigating her preservice teachers’ study of equity-focused, ambitious science teaching in opposition to the teacher-centered, didactic science teaching of their clinical teaching experience.
We directly explore these tensions with the goal of reconciling how we persist within the confines of the new social contract in education, advocating for equity in a context that spurs its importance and compromises our longevity in the field.
