Thomas M. Philip

An “Ideology in Pieces” Approach to Studying Change in Teachers’ Sensemaking About Race, Racism, and Racial Justice

This article makes a unique contribution to the literature on teachers’ racialized sensemaking by proposing a framework of “ideology in pieces” that synthesizes Halls (1982, 1996) theory of ideology and diSessas (1993) theory of conceptual change. Halls theory of ideology enables an examination of teachers’ sensemaking as situated within a structured society and diSessas research on conceptual change provides an analytical lens to understand the elements of ideological sensemaking and the processes of ideological transformation. I use the framework of ideology in pieces to analyze and interpret the ideological sensemaking and transformation of a teacher engaged in a collaborative teacher research group in which participants explored issues of social justice in their high school math and science classrooms. The framework and analysis presented in the article offer a more comprehensive theory of teachers’ ideological sensemaking and transformation that includes their cognitive, social, and structural dimensions.

A Framework for Learning about Big Data with Mobile Technologies for Democratic Participation: Possibilities, Limitations, and Unanticipated Obstacles.

As Big Data becomes increasingly important in policy-making, research, marketing, and commercial applications, we argue that literacy in this domain is critical for engaged democratic participation and that peer-generated data from mobile technologies offer rich possibilities for students to learn about this new genre of data. Through the lens of what we term the paradigms of technology and cutting-edge content as an educational end, means, and equalizer, we explore how learning about Big Data with mobile technologies exists at the critical intersection of issues such as the purpose of schooling, global competitiveness, corporate profit, student agency, and democratic participation. These competing interests surface tensions at the classroom, institutional, and societal levels. Engaging these tensions, we offer a framework of student objectives for learning about Big Data with mobile technologies. Through a reflection on the challenges we continue to encounter as we attempt to implement innovative curriculum within the constraints of urban public schools, we hope to prompt dialogue and changes in practice with respect to what it means to learn for democratic participation using Big Data.

Becoming Racially Literate About Data and Data-Literate About Race: Data Visualizations in the Classroom as a Site of Racial-Ideological Micro-Contestations

ABSTRACT Data visualizations are now commonplace in the public media. The ability to interpret and create such visualizations, as a form of data literacy, is increasingly important for democratic participation. Yet, the cross-disciplinary knowledge and skills needed to produce and use data visualizations and to develop data literacy are not fluidly integrated into traditional K–12 subject areas. In this article, we nuance and complicate the push for data literacy in STEM reform efforts targeting youth of color. We explore a curricular reform project that integrated explicit attention to issues pertaining to the collection, analysis, interpretation, representation, visualization, and communication of data in an introductory computer science class. While the study of data in this unit emphasized viewing and approaching data in context, neither the teacher nor the students were supported in negotiating the racialized context of data that emerged in classroom discussions. To better understand these dynamics, we detail the construct of racial literacy and develop an interpretative framework of racial-ideological micro-contestations. Through an in-depth analysis of a classroom interaction using this framework, we explore how contestations about race can emerge when data visualizations from the public media are incorporated into STEM learning precisely because the contexts of data are often racialized. We argue that access to learning about data visualization, without a deep interrogation of race and power, can be counterproductive and that efforts to develop authentic data literacy require the concomitant development of racial literacy.

The Learning Sciences in a New Era of U.S. Nationalism

ABSTRACT What responsibilities do researchers of learning have in the wake of Trumps election and the proliferation of far-right, populist nationalism across the globe? In this essay, we seek to prompt and engage a dialogue about the political role and responsibilities of our field at this historical moment. First, we situate the social hierarchies that were most pronounced during this election within a longer history of U.S. policies and practices. We then examine the ostensible division between research on learning and the political contexts and consequences of learning. We argue for the need to address this false chasm and build on scholarship that has demonstrated the inextricable links among learning, power, and politics. We conclude by exploring how research on learning might more meaningfully engage with the political dimensions of learning through teaching, engaged research, publishing, professional forums, and service.

Schooling Mobile Phones Assumptions About Proximal Benefits, the Challenges of Shifting Meanings, and the Politics of Teaching

Mobile devices are increasingly upheld as powerful tools for learning and school reform. In this article, we prioritize youth voices to critically examine assumptions about student interest in mobile devices that often drive the incorporation of new technologies into schools. By demonstrating how the very meaning of mobile phones shift as they are institutionalized and by highlighting the divergences between adult and youth assumptions about these devices, we make a significant contribution to policy debates about the role of new digital technologies in the classroom. In addition, we explore challenges such as privacy, freedom, and resource-use that emerge when scaling-upthe use of mobile technologies in the classroom.

Toward a teacher solidarity lens: former teachers of color (re)envisioning educational research

Based on a two-year self-study by a group of early-career scholars of color, we explore and purposefully name our role, within the contemporary context of neoliberal reform, as educational researchers of color who are former K-12 teachers. We capture the insights that emerged from our self-study through a close reading of dominant neoliberal educational reform discourses, particularly through an examination of the writings of Michelle Rhee and Wendy Kopp. Along three dimensions of: (1) experience as teachers; (2) solidarity with teachers; and (3) analyses of racism in schooling, we characterize prominent discourses through which educators, researchers, and the public describe teachers and teaching. We name these discursive frames to make explicit the assumptions that are embedded in each and the intentional or inadvertent consequences of each. Finally, we propose a teacher solidarity lens through which we strive to approach our research and work with teachers.

Programs of teacher education as mediators of White teacher identity

A growing body of scholarship in teacher education has explored the historical, systemic, interactional, and individual factors that create possibilities and challenges in White teachers’ reconceptualization of their racial identity and of the purpose and nature of their work in a racialized society. However, there has been little attention to programs of teacher education as critical mediators of such learning and change. Through an analysis of in-depth interviews with four prospective White teachers in the United States, we develop a framework of White teachers’ racial identities as situated within racial ideologies and mediated by the context of teacher education programs. The framework helps elucidate how teachers’ racial identities are instantiated through interactions and available identities in a program space, which are in turn shaped both by ideology and program structure and culture. The framework and findings urge an insertion of our own agency, as teacher educators, into the analyses of White prospective teachers’ learning and change, by highlighting our role as individuals who co-construct the programmatic structure and culture that partially instantiates these teachers’ racial identities.

Experience as College Student Activists: A Strength and Liability for Prospective Teachers of Color in Urban Schools

Understanding teaching as a political act is often assumed to be a strength for teachers; however, this assumption conceals important aspects of their processes of becoming politicized. I argue that seeing teaching as a political act can be a liability for prospective teachers of color who engaged with college student activism if these assumed qualities are not productively addressed in teacher education programs. I examine trajectories of change in a prospective teacher’s sense-making about activism over the course of her first year in a master’s and credential program and explore the implications of these findings for programs of teacher education.

The Possibilities of Being "Critical": Discourses That Limit Options for Educators of Color.

Through a close reading of the talk of a self-identified critical educator of color, we explore the contradictions, possibilities, limitations, and consequences of this identity for teachers and teacher educators. We examine how the performances of particular critical educator of color identities problematically intertwine claims of Freirian pedagogy with crude dichotomizations of people as critical and non-critical. We explore how particular tropes limit the productive possibilities of being critical for other educators of color and erase the centrality of dialogue, reflexivity, and unfinishedness that define Freirian-inspired notions of being critical.

Articulating the “How,” the “For What,” the “For Whom,” and the “With Whom” in Concert: A Call to Broaden the Benchmarks of our Scholarship

Cognition and Instruction has developed a well-deserved reputation for publishing empirically grounded scholarship that makes rich theoretical contributions to what it means to “think, learn, know, and teach” (Enyedy & Hall, 2017, p. 2). As described in our Aims & Scope, the commitment to theory building in this journal “preferentially attends to the ‘how’ of learning.” From the establishment of the journal in 1984, prioritizing the how has been an intellectual endeavor to push back on frameworks that diminish the complexity and contextuality of learning. At least implicitly, if not explicitly, this journal’s emphasis has been a political stance that strives to influence and redesign the environments in which people learn. As editors, we hope to build on this rich tradition of Cognition and Instruction. We call on those of us who intend to publish in this journal to more clearly attend to the ways in which the for what, for whom, and with whom of teaching and learning are necessarily intertwined with the how of learning—an effort that asks us to carefully examine and address the cultural and political contexts and consequences of our scholarship. We also hope to unequivocally broaden this journal’s usage of teaching and learning to include and appeal to scholars whose work on culture and politics may fall outside traditional notions of cognition and instruction. Our invitation is meant to enrich and not diminish the theoretically and methodologically rich contributions to teaching and learning for which Cognition and Instruction has become known. As a scholarly community, we continue to develop a wide array of theoretical, methodological, and analytical lenses and tools to attend to cognition and its social and interactional nature.We have also becomemore responsive to moves across the social and behavioral sciences to attend to the diversity of human cognition and development beyond participants, methods, and purposes that are rooted in the epistemologies and values of dominant groups in Western, industrialized nations (Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010; Bang et al., 2016; Medin, Ojalehto, Marin, & Bang, 2017; Smith, 1999).We are asking this scholarly community to join the effort in the broader fields of the social and behavioral sciences to expand what we know about human possibilities. Indeed, we are already headed in that direction. A growing body of research published in this journal has started tomake headway on how power, race, and culture intersect with cognition, learning, and teaching (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016; Jurow et al, 2016; Philip, 2011; Philip, Olivares-Pasillas, & Rocha, 2016; Rubel et al., 2016; Vakil, Royston, Nasir, & Kirshner, 2016; Zavala, 2016). These perspectives emphasize that socially and locally meaningful forms of power differentially shape opportunities to learn, aswell as the values and consequences ofwhat is learned (Gutiérrez& Jurow, 2016). They elucidate how power, itself, is partially constituted and contested through learning. These collective advances in our scholarly community highlight new possibilities for bringing the for what, for whom, and with whom to bear on studies of the how of cognition and instruction. The unique opportunity that this journal presents—to generate scholarship in which these four dimensions of teaching and learning are fundamentally tethered—is what we find most promising in contributing to foundational knowledge and learning contexts that matter for young people, their families, and communities.