At last week’s AERA conference, I was thrilled with the conversation (both in person and online) that emerged from the session, “Talking Back: Public Scholarship, Productive Practice, and the Future of Teacher Education.” Organized by Lauren Anderson and Jamy Stillman, the session was framed around sharing photojournals what teacher education work looks like and our role in terms of public scholarship.

Because we were limited to five minutes for discussing our work, I wrote out my notes for the session and I am sharing them below. Prior to diving into these comments, I really encourage you to look at the photojournal here and to look at the other photojournals my amazing co-presenters shared. My page looks like this:

And my comments:

Thank you Lauren and Jamy for inviting me to share my work with all of you.

As I assembled my final photojournal, I did a lot of deleting of words.

There are voice memos sprinkled throughout my journal and they are full of blemishes: ums, uhs, and even blasphemous “likes.” There are more photos of sitting in meetings or of traveling than there are of my students and work in schools. There are a lot of photos of computer screens.

And so while I first attempted to justify these pieces of media with flowery prose, I eventually deleted those words to allow a public image of my scholarship and its processes stand on its own.

There is a rambling video introduction at the beginning of my journal and at the risk of being redundant, I’m going to cover and expand on a few of the main principles I ummed, uhhed, and liked my way through in that video.

When I was in graduate school, one of my advisors, Marjorie Faulstich Orellana, talked about the fundamental differences in time and the various professional and home demands on it. Case in point: regardless of what kinds of deadlines, meetings, or piles of letters of recommendation that are awaiting completion on my desk, the raising-children-training-wheels that my wife and I have: two headstrong, scent-driven beagles must be walked.

Twice.

Everyday.

Sure, if things are busy you could hypothetically not walk them, but they have Machiavellian plans a la Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone – they will destroy the house (and destroy it gleefully) if unwalked. This is a blood oath they have both forsworn the moment we adopted them from the shelter.

And as much as I can get frustrated by finding the balance between home time and time for scholarship, I believe they are two sides of the same coin. Aside from listening to audiobooks and podcasts, I find the time for reflection on our meandering jaunts to be fundamental for helping clarify my thinking; it is the generative space in which reflection helps bind the theoretical with the pragmatic in my scholarship.

And so, to the extent that home time funnels, focuses, and shapes the day-to-day public scholarship that I engage in, so too must I be direct in noting that teacher education is not confined to classrooms.

I deliberately only offered a few sections of photos that are classroom-focused. I think that we educate teachers and teacher education through modeling the various other non-teaching responsibilities we take on in the many spaces that we inhabit. Like my colleagues’ photojournals illustrating digital life and activism, I believe we need to emphasize scholarship that does not so easily appear as peer reviewed publications or get checked off as professional service. I take my responsibility of making the educational landscape more just seriously. And I don’t find the time engaged in dialogue in spaces like Twitter, building consensus with other educators, or even reflecting during walks as flippant or “extra” to my professional responsibilities; they are all interrelated.

Which brings me to a lingering question about public scholarship and teacher education: public for whom? As I think about the work that I am doing as equity driven and scholarship that happens alongside the teachers, students, and community organizations I see as colleagues, I am reminded that we are myriad publics today.

In light of online and offline persecution of young people of color, individuals by race, class, sexuality, legal status, and placement within societal gender binaries, ours is work about addressing varied publics, and looking for intersections for uniting, coalescing, and growing.

Probably weekly I say to my preservice teachers that ours is political work. It cannot not be. The work of education, political as it is, does not start and stop in classrooms. It seeps into the conversations we have, the ways our income is disbursed through the purchasing decisions we make, and the roads we make by walking – to riff off of a book-length dialogue between Paulo Freire and Myles Horton.

In this sense, public scholarship is something of an embodied stance.

To return to my opening thoughts on a false binary between school time and life time, I would add that this is about scholarship that – particularly in today’s digital, participatory culture – unfolds over a lifetime.

We may warn our youthful future teachers to not put up any personal material on social networks or they will be fired and die. However, this is precisely how dialogue happens. My public work is inherently social work too. My educational scholarship is public scholarship.

I hope this journal reflects most wholly my own participation in a public sphere – be it in the generative and reflective processes while tethered to two beasts hot on the scent of a dastardly squirrel or while presenting at conferences or facilitating classroom activities. Ours is nuanced and complicated work.

Thank you.

I want to briefly share my AERA schedule for this week:

Some details on these presentations:

• My Saturday morning session is built around a broader project and AERA Presidential Session in which I was invited to produce a photojournal reflecting on my role as a teacher educator. I would encourage you to take a look at the project website here and my specific photojournal here. Here’s the abstract for the entire session:
  

  Abstract: This session challenges the overly simplistic public and policy discourses that treat university-based teacher education as fundamentally responsible for low-performing schools. It offers snapshots of innovative teacher education work and explores how such work might be presented more effectively to the public and policymakers as they consider approaches to high quality teacher preparation. The session features four equity-minded teacher educators/scholars whose innovative, politically engaged work reflects and expands upon the field’s longstanding commitment to producing public scholarship that connects research to practice in schools and communities. These four presenters – Elizabeth Dutro, Antero Garcia, Bettina Love, and Bree Picower – will base their brief comments, in part, on open-access digital photo-journals they created to capture and communicate their work. Two discussants – Ken Zeichner, senior scholar of teacher education, and Melinda Anderson, education writer and parent – will offer response that address teacher education’s future, specifically how to educate better the public about teacher educators’ work and its impact.

• My poster session shares (very) preliminary findings from my ongoing ethnographic work studying tabletop roleplaying games. However, my D&D dice are packed and the bulk of the poster real estate is devoted to a gaming playmat: I fully intend to play through this poster session, so come grab a pre-generated character sheet from me!

• Finally, my presentation Sunday morning is built on my work with teachers in Los Angeles engaging in “Player Professional Development” and community-drive game jams (described previously here). I will be presenting a paper co-authored with my nemesis, Mark Gomez.

I should briefly add that an update to this blog is long overdue! In the short term, let me say that I have still been blogging monthly(ish) at DMLcentral (recent posts here, here, and here) and have been mumbling through blog-like thoughts using Anchor, like this:

A few other housekeeping things:

I am co-facilitating a workshop based on Youth Participatory Action Research for the 2016 Digital Media and Learning Conference. My co-facilitators, Nicole Mirra and Danielle Filipiak, and I discussed the workshop recently:

You should consider joining our workshop!

I have a chapter in the recent collection The Role-Playing Society: Essays on the Cultural Influence of RPGs titled “Teacher as Dungeon Master: Connected Learning, Democratic Classrooms, and Rolling for Initiative”. It’s a scorcher!

Finally, back in January I delivered the keynote for the 2016 Technology in Education Conference presented by the Collaborative for Educational Services. If you’ve got an hour to kill, you can watch the whole thing below (my presentation begins at 6:20).