Transforming Teacher Education Thinking: Complexity and Relational Ways of Knowing

Abstract

In order that teacher education programs can act as significant scaffolds in supporting new teachers to become informed, creative and innovative members of a highly complex and valuable profession, we need to re-imagine ways in which teacher education programs operate. We need to re-imagine how courses are conceptualized and connected, how learning is shared and how knowledge, not just “professional”, but embedded knowledge in authentic contexts of teaching and learning is understood, shaped and re-applied. Drawing on our study of a locally developed program in secondary teacher education called Transformative University of Victoria (TRUVIC), we offer a relational approach to knowing as an alternative to more mechanistic explanations that limit teacher growth and development. To ground our interpretation, we draw on complexity theory as a theory of change and emergence that supports learning as distributed, relational, adaptive and emerging.

Understanding teachers as complex professional learners

“…More specifically, and in common with an increasing number of authors, (e.g. Opfer and Pedder 2011, Cochran-Smith et al 2014, Sanford, et al 2015, we seek to contribute to this professional learning debate by exploring how ideas from complexity thinking and ecological perspectives have the potential to act as a conceptual lens to help us better understand, design and support teachers' long term professional learning.…”

Finding the Connective Tissue in Teacher Education: Creating New Spaces for Professional Learning to Teach

“…Indeed, one or two courses each term in the program were still focused on covering content and using tests to ensure TCs read course material; however, the contrasting experience in the TRUVIC cluster of courses meant that TCs came to appreciate the collective self-organizing, adaptive, and emergent form of learning that was being modelled. As was noted in Sanford et al (2015), the TRUVIC students formed a collective consciousness that observed, became comfortable in a school (in different pedagogical spaces), got to know adolescent students, then volunteered to teach as they saw how they could contribute to the school teachers' lessons. This process shifted how students as a cohort and their instructors as a collective described the world of teaching, as they learned to teach with a relational epistemology, interact with adolescents and bring forth the knowledge of being a teacher from different pedagogical spaces.…”

“…In agreement, we have explored this application of complexivist philosophy. Emphasizing the interaction of parts in a TE program and working from the ground up, we have focused on a relational approach to knowing that offers a perspective that frames human learning and the cognitive processes it entails as distributed in the world and our interactions in that world (Sanford, Hopper & Starr, 2015).…”

“…This networked "participatory" way of developing teacher knowledge resonates with the complexivist approach to educational change focused on the interactions between agents of system with the affordances of the environment that allows the a complex learning system to emerge (Davis & Sumara, 2005;Hoban, 2002). This has led us to explore the use of electronic portfolios as a vehicle to map student development (Hopper, Sanford, & Bonsor-Kurki, 2012), to enable program renewal (Hopper & Sanford, 2010) and to form a professional hub, an extended memory for the forming teacher shared with a web of peers (Hopper, Sanford, Fu, & Monk, 2016;Sanford et al, 2015). As advocated by Hoban (2002), the networked professional then becomes the intelligent agent of a self-organizing system of teacher practices as they are able to carry information about themselves from actions towards intended actions in the pursuit of quality teaching.…”

“…We have previously described this program using a complexivist lens (Sanford et al, 2015), focusing on the relational pedagogy that developed between the students, their instructors, the school, and the content knowledge. Recognizing that learning is cyclical, social, and interconnected in multiple complex ways, we have worked to create a coherent and connected set of experiences that are both deep (paradigmatic) and cumulative (narrative).…”