Making the invisible visible

This study goes inside a teacher community to look in depth at a year in the life of a five-year teacher development seminar. It documents and attempts to understand how teachers construct, explore, and learn about issues of race, and integrate them into their practice. It investigates these ideas from three angles: race, program design, and theory. First, it explores how the group studied issues of race so that race was not merely an add-on, but centrally placed on the same plane as other critical issues in teacher development. Looking at the design of a professional development project, it focuses on understanding the negotiation between the qualities of the individual teacher as learner and the collective learning practices of the group; the goal is to shape professional development sites that more closely support teachers in improving their instruction. Third, it explores how socio-cultural learning theory , which situates learning as a social and distributed process, can be used to understand issues of race in school settings. A close analysis of group meetings and interviews uncovered several practices that facilitated the process of learning for individual teachers and for the group as a whole. They include: highlighting the underlying practices through which conversations about race were constructed, identifying collegial practices that supported teachers in seeing their colleagues as resources, and identifying practices that distributed the learning across the group and from the COP to individual teachers' practices. These practices provided the group members with diverse ways to explore and integrate issues of race into their practice in generative and meaningful ways. Implications of the study include the importance of developing communities of practice where race is integrated into other issues of practice because it deepens how teachers see their practice. These findings highlight the need for professional development that is: situated in teacher's every day practice, social, in order for teachers practice to be investigated collaboratively with colleagues and, distributed, where new ideas that are developed can be shared across the group.