Breaking the Fourth Wall: Reaching Beyond Observer/Performer Binaries in Studies of Teacher and Researcher Learning

Kavanagh, Sarah Schneider; Resnick, Alison Fox; Ghousseini, Hala; Gotwalt, Elizabeth Schiavone; Cordero-Siy, Eric; Kazemi, Elham; Dutro, Elizabeth

doi:10.1080/07370008.2021.2010209

Cited by 10 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 39 publications

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“…The norm of non-interference is especially visible in mentors’ responses to three inside-the-action vignettes that portray some form of “stepping in” by the mentor. What we and other scholars of TE (Braaten, 2019; Ghousseini et al, 2021; Gibbons et al, 2017; Kavanagh, Resnick et al, 2022; Kazemi et al, 2016; Stroupe & Gotwals, 2018) have thought of as stepping in they saw as stepping on, a form of interference with negative consequences for the novice’s identity, authority, and self-confidence. Mentors’ sensitivity to novices’ feelings is certainly well-intentioned.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 94%

“…The reasons that our participants gave for why they preferred outside-the-action mentoring to mentoring-in-the-moment tended to center on protecting novice teacher agency and authority and on protecting the mentor-novice relationship. These reasons shed light on a culture of mentoring rooted in the broader culture of teaching, which tends to value norms of privacy, individualism, politeness, and non-interference (Ghousseini et al, 2021;Kavanagh, Resnick et al, 2022;Little, 1990aLittle, ,1990bLortie, 1975) and reflect a preference for congeniality over critical colleagueship (Little, 1990a(Little, , 1990bLord, 1999).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The norms of privacy, individualism, politeness, congeniality, and non-interference associated with the culture of teaching (Ghousseini et al, 2021;Kavanagh, Resnick et al, 2022;Little, 1990aLittle, , 1990bLord, 1999;Lortie, 1975) may be part of the reason that mentors typically reject inside-the-action mentoring practices. However, it may also have good reasons to save their mentoring for moments when students are not present.…”

Section: An Expanded Vision Of Mentoring: Stepping In As Stepping Up ...mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Stepping in or Stepping On: Mentor Teachers’ Preferences for Mentoring Inside and Outside of Interactive Teaching

Kavanagh

Feiman‐Nemser

Hammerness

et al. 2022

Journal of Teacher Education

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Much research describes how mentor and novice teachers interact when pupils are not present (e.g., co-planning, debriefing). However, little research investigates how mentor/novice pairs interact when K–12 students are present. This gap in the literature is significant because research suggests that without intentional mediation, novices often fail to see much of what happens in classrooms. This article investigates and conceptualizes what 27 mentors think about mentoring practices that occur outside versus inside of instructional time. An analysis of mentor interviews found that mentors prefer to interact with novices outside of instructional time because they fear undercutting novices’ authority and autonomy when interacting with them during instruction. However, findings also suggest that hybrid practices (those that straddle the outside/inside boundary) are valued by mentors although they are rarely enacted. This finding has implications for programs interested in supporting mentors to diversify the practices they employ to support novice teachers.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 94%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: An Expanded Vision Of Mentoring: Stepping In As Stepping Up ...mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Stepping in or Stepping On: Mentor Teachers’ Preferences for Mentoring Inside and Outside of Interactive Teaching

Kavanagh

Feiman‐Nemser

Hammerness

et al. 2022

Journal of Teacher Education

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“…Building upon Barad's (2007) ideas of performativity, we cocreated rhizomatic connections and lines of flight arising from the geography of the conference, sparked by an audience member's comment about performance; this led us to the title and concepts of the paper you are now reading. Through intra‐action, some people in the audience broke through the fourth wall, disrupting the binary of observer and performer, speaker and listener, presenter and audience member (Kavanaugh et al, 2022). The experience invited people into relational engagement with the panel presenters—and it required that our feelings be navigated collectively, revealing intimacies and tensions and flattening hierarchies.…”

Section: In Conclusionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mattering: Per/forming nursing philosophy in the Chthulucene

et al. 2023

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This paper presents an overview of the process of entanglement at the 25th International Philosophy of Nursing Conference (IPNC) at University of California at Irvine held on August 18, 2022. Representing collective work from the US, Canada, UK and Germany, our panel entitled 'What can critical posthuman philosophies do for nursing?' examined critical posthumanism and its operations and potential in nursing. Critical posthumanism offers an antifascist, feminist, material, affective, and ecologically entangled approach to nursing and healthcare. Rather than focusing on the arguments of each of the three distinct but interrelated panel presentation pieces, this paper instead focuses on process and performance (per/formance) and performativity as relational, connected and situated, with connections to nursing philosophy. Building upon critical feminist and new materialist philosophies, we describe intra-activity and performativity as ways to dehierarchise knowledge making practices within traditional academic conference spaces. Creating critical cartographies of thinking and being are actions of possibility for building more just and equitable futures for nursing, nurses, and those they accompany-including all humans, nonhumans, and more than human matter.

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“…Challenging the fourth wall raises tensions we have grappled with in our work that are inherent to any effort to make teaching public. In this section, we discuss some of these tensions and how they have provided generative contexts for our collaborative teams of teachers and researchers to continually negotiate shared lesson enactments within a process of learning (Kavanagh et al, 2021; Staley, 2018). Instructional tensions are genuine and legitimate, and always present in teaching.…”

Section: Tensions In Breaking the Fourth Wallmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Fourth Wall of Professional Learning and Cultures of Collaboration

Ghousseini

Kavanagh

Dutro

et al. 2021

Educational Researcher

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Recent innovations in professional development are rife with a wide array of efforts focused on teacher collaboration. In this essay, we address some of the unexamined assumptions about the nature and significance of interactions in teacher professional collaboration, drawing on the concept of the “fourth wall” from theater and film studies. The fourth wall is a term used to describe the invisible wall that separates actors from their audience. We use this metaphor to interrogate the function of the fourth wall in professional learning and argue that it reflects a culture of professional learning that, despite innovations that tout teacher collaboration, upholds isolation in teaching and teacher learning and deep embedded norms of noninterference in one another’s practice. We also attend to the possibilities for supporting teacher learning that breaching the fourth wall affords when shared enactments of practice are used as a context for teachers’ sensemaking and collaboration.

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Breaking the Fourth Wall: Reaching Beyond Observer/Performer Binaries in Studies of Teacher and Researcher Learning

Cited by 10 publications

References 39 publications

Stepping in or Stepping On: Mentor Teachers’ Preferences for Mentoring Inside and Outside of Interactive Teaching

Stepping in or Stepping On: Mentor Teachers’ Preferences for Mentoring Inside and Outside of Interactive Teaching

Mattering: Per/forming nursing philosophy in the Chthulucene

The Fourth Wall of Professional Learning and Cultures of Collaboration

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