Cultural Landscapes Collaboratory
"It's on the strength of observation and reflection that one finds a way. So we must dig and delve unceasingly." - Claude Monet
Oftentimes research-based recommendations seem like others telling us what to do — answers, like little rocks, thrown at our heads when we haven’t yet begun asking the questions that matter to us. And in light of today’s schools where high-stakes testing looms, many teachers are committed to nurturing classrooms that become literacy-rich places where learners inquire, explore and create to become life-long learners. Yet often, ironically, schools afford teachers little time or space to create parallel spaces for them to continue their own professional learning. A daunting task for teachers, then, becomes how to create sustainable professional learning spaces where we learn to draw on empirical research to understand each other’s professional experiences, to nurture and transform our professional stances and practices — where we learn to become the researchers, too, who seek answers to the questions that emerge from our everyday work.
The Cultural Landscapes Collaboratory was founded in 2004 in an innovative partnership of National Writing Project teachers from different project sites. NWP, the longest, sustaining teacher-based professional development network in the United States, has as its core mission to improve writing instruction and learning in our nation’s schools by cultivating teacher leadership as a cornerstone of equity (NWP & Nagin, 2006). The Collaboratory’s professional learning model is grounded in the work and Interactional Ethnographic research approach (Green, Dixon & Zaharlick, 2003; Dixon, Green & Brandts, 2005) of the Santa Barbara Classroom Discourse Group (SBCDG), a school/university collaborative research partnership with almost a 20-year history (Dixon & Green, 2009), of which Collaboratory Co-Director, Dr. Ralph Cordova is a long-time member. The Collaboratory’s teacher members are from rural and urban settings (California, Illinois, Missouri and Texas), different grade levels, content areas and institutions, who convene in an inquiry-focused summer institute each year. They develop research partnerships with each other within and across geographic regions, each partner researching her own classroom as a culture. Throughout the year, between summer inquiry institutes, members use video conferring and analysis technologies to stay connected, to plan, and to examine data from our teaching and learning processes in our particular settings.
The Collaboratory’s program of research is guided by these overarching orienting questions:
1. Where and when is learning? We explore and develop theoretical and methodological approaches for the overtime study of ourselves in relation to our local community of learners. We examine the ways in which our Collaboratory supports diverse teachers from diverse settings, across urban and rural settings, serving as resources for each other in meeting the challenges presented by a common ‘narrowing of curriculum’ and pedagogical options. Central to how the community accomplishes this is its use of face2face communication strategies, along with digital video technology, to mediate individual classroom-based inquiries.
2. How are classrooms and community spaces cultural landscapes for learning? We explore this concept by juxtaposing educational theories of culture and language, with geologic notions of space and physical movement. Through this lens, we explore how classroom and community locations' walls are permeable phenomena meant to be navigated across in purposeful, educative ways.
3. Whose knowledge counts? Grounded in perspectives for teaching for social justice, we recognize the value and brilliance that exists within community groups. We support each other as teacher-researchers to interrogate our practices by developing inquiring stances equipping us to pursue classroom and location-based inquiries. In doing so, we are simultaneously supporting each other to grow as teacher leaders. We are a teachers-teaching-teachers group.