Teacher Development Grant 2023-2024 Project Summary

Mary Beth Snow Balderas

Herrera Elementary School • Houston, TX

Early Childhood Teachers’ Inquiry Group: Cultivating Critical Consciousness about Language and Ability revolves around a practitioner inquiry space that will position teachers and their experiences in classrooms as life-long learners and generators of knowledge (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009), developing teachers’ critical consciousness around the intersections of language and ability through a lens of deconstructing normalcy. This inquiry group will provide teachers with a space to reflect upon classroom practice and to collaboratively (re)design classroom environments, routines, and instructional practices, drawing on the distributed knowledge and experience in the room, as well as undertaking new learning together.

Teachers involved in this project will use Descriptive Inquiry (Himley, 2002), an approach to practitioner inquiry that relies on structured, communal processes of reflection and paves the way for creative action in response to it. Descriptive processes center the full humanity of children and teachers as “makers” (Carini, 2001) and recognize the relationship between the learning of both children and teachers (Furman & Traugh, 2021, p. 134). The processes involved guide participants to illuminate and understand through processes of description, moving away from sweeping generalizations and stereotypes to focus participants’ reflection on the specificity of their particular context and practice.

Using descriptive inquiry positions teachers as humans who are vital parts of the classroom community and who are capable of continually growing and deepening their practice. To honor the process of authentic collaborative inquiry, the focus of which particular literacy lesson plans, assessments, or activities teachers will (re)design will be chosen according to what teachers perceive as their greatest need in the context of their classroom.

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