The Teacher as Gatherer: A Review of Priya Parker's Art of Gathering (original) (raw)
Observers of teachers’ practice in their classrooms have typically been adults: academic researchers analysing professional practice, school executive members assessing teacher quality and colleagues engaged in professional development and school reform initiatives. This paper discusses observations of teachers’ practice from a different vantage point: students. In 2011, two Year 9 students observed a teacher in her classroom. This student research event was part of a broader four-year Students-as-Co-Researchers initiative investigating teaching and learning in a low socio-economic high school receiving targeted funding. In 2013, these students were invited to remember and re-construct the 2011 research event in various configurations. This paper examines the affective flows at work in re-positioning students and teachers using the concepts of the “assemblage” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/ 1987), subjectivity as “lines” (Deleuze & Parnet, 2006/ 1977) and “rhizoanalysis” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/ 1987). It is argued that lines of flight - ruptures in thought and experimentation in practice - escaped in and through the 2011 research event and the 2013 research assemblages for both the students, the teacher and the researcher. Alternative ways of speaking, relating, teaching, learning and becoming prompted by these encounters in the classroom, the staffroom and the school are considered for their potential to convert the “education assemblage” (Youdell, 2011, p. 137).
CEPS Journal, 2025
This timely publication delves into the establishment and maintenance of teacher communities or collectives. Teacher collectives are pivotal in driving educational change, fostering school improvement, and ultimately enhancing student learning outcomes. The book explores how the intersections of group dynamics, community building, and networking contribute to teacher interaction for both learning and professional growth. It aims to answer the question of how to foster and sustain such a community, particularly for practitioners.
The audacity of building community: A teacher looks at the end of every fork.
In this article, I theorize a specific pedagogical moment as a teacher educator by taking up a particular aspect of phenomenological philosophythe phenomenological reductionand a particular conception of pedagogy informed by Bourdieu's philosophiesnomos and habitusin order to put them in closer dialog with one another. I also bring the theoretical and conceptual work of other critical and poststructural thinkershooks and Bolerto bear on a nagging pedagogical concern I experienced as a teacher educator when one of my students made me painfully aware of something I had missed, creating a landscape for how each may be imagined as not only exercises of teaching but as larger commitments to practice and theory, relationship with learners, as well as relationship with self. This concern became a phenomenological pedagogical moment of self-discovery and defined possibility in the classroom where I learned to shift and suspend pedagogical practices and step back to take a moment to see what had yet to be noticed, a time in which I chose to eat a naked lunch.
Critics' Choice Book Award, 2009 - American Educational Studies Association (AESA) Outstanding Book Award, 2010 - for significant contributions to methodology of qualitative educational research - Qualitative Research SIG (AERA)
2017
The purpose of this research was to investigate how a classroom that employs Liberating Structures (LS) is perceived and experienced by class participants. Liberating Structures (LS) are simple protocols of how people interact while they work and learn together, allowing for inclusion and engagement of all participants at the same time. The research examined how the use of LS practices and processes in a classroom influences participants' sense of inclusion and engagement, their sense of being part of a learning community, and their perceptions of the learning and relational outcomes that accrue. Various methods of data collection and analysisparticipant observation and (auto) ethnography, in-depth and focus interviews, and participants' weekly learner notes-were employed. These data were coded openly, and constantly compared for common themes and emerging patterns with respect to what LS make possible in a classroom. From my analysis of an LS classroom over a semester-long period, it was clear that when an instructor pays purposive attention to the five micro-structural elements-an invitation, use of space, distribution of participation, group configuration, and sequencing and time allocationthe group outcomes are of a higher order and quality. Participants felt included and engaged and part of a cohesive, tolerant, and open learning community. Such feelings manifested through a variety of processes and mechanisms, including from participants' sitting in a circle, learning each other's names, sharing food, hosting visitors, trusting each other, feeling safe in voicing their opinions, taking ownership of their learning, and feeling included and engaged in the conduct of the classroom. Further, the instructor's facilitative attitude, and corresponding actions, were found to be highly conducive to the creation of a vibrant learning community. v Acknowledgement I would like to express my most sincere appreciation to my thesis advisor and committee chair, Dr. Arvind Singhal, who, with his tremendous effort, wisdom, and invaluable ideas steered me along this journey. It was a great honor and privilege to work under his direction. Thank you, Sir, for introducing me and giving me a glimpse into the wonderful world that is LS. Thank you for your continuing support as I take on the challenge of continuing to learn and grow in this area of marvel and wonder. In addition, I would also like to thank my committee members-Drs. Lucía Durá and Sarah Upton, for their patience, guidance, and support. I am truly grateful. Thank you, Dr. Durá, for your insight and expertise. Thank you, Dr. Upton, for joining me in tackling all things LS. I would also like to thank other members of the UTEP LS community, especially Ms. Lauren Perez, for your guidance and support, and for trusting me to stand by your side, my friend. I would also like to publicly thank LS co-founders, Henri Lipmanowicz and Keith McCandless-thank you for bringing a long overdue set of communicative practices in the public domain-ones that inspire, include, and change the world one conversation at a time. I also owe a deep gratitude to my mother, Leticia Garcia. Without her encouragement, support and amazing advice I would not have pursed this endeavor. Lastly, I would like to thank my family, Jessica and Andrew. Thank you for all your support with my deadlines and late nights. Thank you for your quiet.
A Teaching Conference of One's Own: Inviting Faculty Into the Scholarly Work of Teaching
This essay examines the value of creating a peer-reviewed conference on teaching at one's own campus. A conference created by faculty and for faculty is an effective way to address several challenges faced by many teaching centers, especially the challenge of involving a wide range of faculty in scholarly approaches to teaching. I cite experience and data from my center's work in this area over the past six years and contextualize it amidst the literature on the scholarship of teaching and learning.
Teaching Theology & Religion, 2011
And, finally, Mary Elizabeth Moore explores the interactive processes linking formation, information, reformation, and transformation.
A deconstructive approach to class meetings
When the quality of teacher-student and student-student relationships is undermined by conflicts, classrooms can become unwelcoming environments that are not conducive to teaching and learning. Circle conversations are widely utilized in response to such conflicts as well as for academic and community-building purposes. In this article, we introduce a form of circle conversation, which we have termed 'deconstructive class meeting'. We developed this specific meeting format in a New Zealand secondary school drawing on local, indigenous processes of community conversation, discourse theory and narrative therapy. The structure of our meeting is deliberately designed to support the simultaneous achievement of two, seemingly contradictory objectives: conflict resolution and community building. We argue that when teachers and students collaboratively examine the power of ideas or discourses of learning not only alternatives to problematic practices become available, but learning communities and relationships are strengthened also.
Teacher Learning: Documentation, Collaboration, and Reflection
2000
Inspired by the Municipal preprimary schools ofReggio Emilia, Italy, two art studio teachers and a researcher have explored experiences and meaning in the atelier. When studio teachers document children's thinking through digital photographs. transcribed audio tapes, quotations ofa child's verbal thoughts, and copies of their work, an indescribable moment in teacher thinking interweaves with the child's learning, As teachers capture children's representations, investigate, interpret, and share their ideas with colleagues and community-an underlying question emerges. What are studio teachers' experiences o/teaching-learning in the atelier as they utilize documentation, collaboration, and reflection as a way to inform their practices? From this question, reader and researcher start a journey together into a six-month phenomenological study of studio teaching experiences. As a core member in the teaching team, the studio teacher resides in the atelier to bring teaching and 2 learning together in a profound way, to bridge classroom experiences with representative arts, and to facilitate the community's learning about teaching-learning. The methods used to inform this study include observations, in-depth interviews, electronic joumaling, description, photos, and interpretation of studio work. Overall, this study's methods inform the phenomenological research and construct an in-depth look at experiences in the artist's studio. The results of this research are retold through narratives focusing on experiences and meaning-making in the studios. Stories such as living with the cracked egg; isolation in the studio: gifts for others; rough stones polishing one another; and many others, utilize photographs to enhance meaning through picturesque artifacts. Essential themes, conclusions, and implications appear in the webbing of experiences and are exploted in the final chapter. The themes include conceptual frameworks such as life eats entropy, serendipity and synergy and more. Conclusions are drawn and findings are made connecting studio experiences to participant voice, disequilibrium, listening, engaging, stepping back, and slowing time; demonstrating documentation as learning, revisiting, representation, and manageability; making meaning of collaboration as struggle, communication, and reconstruction; and reflecting back as purposeful and an act of teaching-learning. Overall, this research study exposes techniques, ideas, and wonderings from two studio teachers' and a researcher's experiences in the atelier.