This week’s post features the work of Amelia Peterson and Maria Teresa Tatto. They are two of the participants in this month’s issue of Lead the Change (LtC), which brings together interviews with four members of a virtual convening on Education System (Re)Building for Equity and Social Justice in Teaching and Learning organized by Amanda Datnow, Vicki Park, Don Peurach, and Jim Spillane, with the support of the Spencer Foundation. Last week’s post featured the work of participants Phương Minh Lương and Tine S. Prøitz. The convening, with virtual meetings in May and June of 2023, was designed to help establish “a cross-national community of scholars whose members take appreciative, critical, and practical perspectives on advancing educational access, quality, and equity by (re)building education systems.” To continue the discussions begun during the convenings, we invite those attending the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association in April to join the conversation with Minahil Assim, Thomas Hatch, Phương Minh Lương, Don Peurach, and Tine Prøitz at a symposium for AERA’s Educational Change Special Interest Group – Equity and Educational Transformation in a Cross-National Perspective. The LtC series is produced by Alex Lamb and colleagues from the Educational Change Special Interest Group of the American Educational Research Association. A pdf of the fully formatted interview is available on the LtC website.
Amelia Peterson
Lead the Change (LtC): The 2024 AERA theme is “Dismantling Racial Injustice and Constructing Educational Possibilities: A Call to Action.” Can you tell us how your work on educational transformation responds to this call?
Amelia Peterson (AP): My research and writing considers two different forms of educational transformations – top down (or “zoomed out”) policy changes and bottom-up (or “zoomed in”) activities at the student and school level. The phrases “zoomed out” and “zoomed in” highlight that a key challenge of dealing with change at scale is abstraction: what is lost from our tacit understandings of equity and justice when we abstract out to make principles or policy for unidentifiable people.
In terms of “zoomed out” policy changes, I have studied how rethinking high school diplomas (what, internationally, we would call upper secondary qualification reform) can change the goals of formal schooling. In my past research I studied how reforms of the 90s and 2000s often replicated inequitable divisions rather than transforming them. Yet, some reforms did lead to models that really combined ‘academic’ and ‘vocational’ education – and with them disrupted associated racial and social stratifications (Peterson, 2020). I am now involved in a policy and practice group called Rethinking Assessment which is focused on possibilities of qualification reform in England and the UK.
In term of the “zoomed in” activity required for these policy changes to make a difference at the student and school level, I have worked with a group of co-researchers to ask: to what extent can approaches such as continuous improvement, teacher inquiry and design-led methods sustain and scale? (Yurkofsky et al., 2020). We are currently working on a book, tentatively titled Design Meets the Real World and one topic we engage with extensively is what kind of conditions and preparation are necessary for these methods to actually disrupt patterns of equity.
LtC: How do you define and operationalize equity (and/or social justice) in your work?
AP: ‘Operationalization’ in its fullest sense is a key concern for me as my pressing work is not research but institution-building. The London Interdisciplinary School (LIS) is a new higher education institution that attempts to bridge some of the divides we see in the sector: between ‘elite’ and open-access; between academic and vocational; and between the Arts and Sciences. In my work at LIS, for the most part, I can be “zoomed in”, trying to realize equity and justice for individual students. As we construct and re-construct our own policies, however, we also require a more “zoomed out” view. In this, I approach equity from a sociological perspective that considers structure and stratification: inequity – as opposed to just difference – is created by reinforcing structures (or feedback loops) that leave little room for agency. A key concern here is with the way prior wealth or lack thereof creates a reinforcing loop. Especially for students who are having to support themselves whilst studying, everything about their educational experience is more challenging, in a reinforcing way. This is a major problem in the context of a cost-of-living crisis in London and stagnant student loan provision in England.
Inequity – as opposed to just difference – is created by reinforcing structures (or feedback loops) that leave little room for agency.
At LIS, we also try to operationalize equity through assessment. Our school and higher education systems currently provide people with very unequal conditions and opportunities to signal and demonstrate their strengths. This informs the way we approach assessment design at LIS, but as we have been working within the norms of UK higher education, there is still much progress we could make here.
LtC: What is a core issue/challenge you are grappling with in your work related to systems and/or equity and social justice?
AP: I share my core challenge with many other educators: how can we foster the emancipatory potential of education in a context where educational performance is the shared metric of societal competition? In other words, how can we balance the demands of freedom and meritocracy?
This is a compelling time to address this dilemma because the dominance of meritocratic thinking seems to be slipping. Pandemic lockdowns created a breakdown in productivity cultures; scandals and crises have undermined some traditional signals of merit, whilst populism has shown the potential of alternative routes to power. Yet, societal competition is just as real as it has ever been, and so there are major risks to any shift from the norms and institutional arrangement that shaped meritocracies. These risks may be worth taking, however, if there are possibilities for different kinds of relationships between individuals and their education, and between schools, society, and work.
These risks may be worth taking, however, if there are possibilities for different kinds of relationships between individuals and their education, and between schools, society, and work.
The core questions I grapple with are: Is it feasible to undermine the traditional signals of educational success (tests, credentials), whilst still promoting the values and ideals that education would ideally foster, such as capabilities, truth, beauty, goodness? Should we just continue in the quest for better signals, or should we try to imagine some quite different way of incentivising and structuring personal and collective investment in education?
LtC: What can researchers and practitioners of educational change learn from your work?
AP: From the London Interdisciplinary School, I hope that researchers and practitioners see the potential for new thinking about what we teach, as well as how and why. In our teaching, we try to balance the practical demands of what it takes to get things done and make changes with the academic demands of what’s required to really comprehend and use complex concepts and skills. This makes for a very demanding curriculum but one in which our students are thriving. They come to us from many different educational pathways and are a testament to the ingenuity and perseverance of young people, when they set real demands. They make me continuously hopeful.
More generally, I hope that others will have more chances to learn from my work over the next year as I put emphasis back onto informal and formal publishing. The recent convening discussed at the start was a welcome opportunity to re-engage with a community of scholars who are working on similar questions in different ways. I do believe this is a moment when we can collectively forge different ideals of the relationship between education and societies, and of what we owe each other and our planet, and I look forward to continuing to work with others on that goal.
Maria Teresa Tatto
Lead the Change (LtC): You were a participant in a recent convening to share and examine work around the world on equity, social justice, and educational transformation, and The 2024 AERA theme is “Dismantling Racial Injustice and Constructing Educational Possibilities: A Call to Action.” Can you tell us how your work on educational transformation responds to this call?
Maria Theresa Tatto (MTT): Principles of justice and equity are the driving force of my work. I study how the intersection of research, policy, and practice can result in more equitable and widely accessible high-quality educational opportunities for marginalized populations. I investigate policy and its effects on education systems, including education reform implementation at the macro, meso, and micro levels, nationally and internationally, within a comparative framework. I mainly look at the impact of educational policy on practice, including the shaping of curriculum and instruction, teaching and learning, and teacher education, as barometers of more significant societal changes and as mediated by organizational and governance structures across economic, political, and cultural/social contexts. I use quantitative and qualitative methods and participatory and reflective approaches to inquiry. My work is characterized by rigorous, collaborative, reflective, capacity-building, and policy-oriented research to generate policy/practice-usable knowledge among colleagues across various country contexts.
LtC: How do you define and operationalize equity (and social justice) in your work?
MTT: In Empowering Teachers for Equitable and Sustainable Education: Action Research, Teacher Agency, and Online Community (Tatto & Brown, in press), I define equity as “the state, quality or ideal of being just, impartial and fair” (AECF, 2014, p.5). According to the Oxford English Dictionary (2023), equity is synonymous with fairness and justice, with fair resource distribution taking individual variations into account. To guarantee that everyone has the same chance of success, various forms of support would be needed for differences that currently marginalize individuals. A more ambitious aim would be to create just systems where equity is sustained long-term. Sustainable justice would seek to create equity in systems as well as individuals. Through the years, societies have introduced systemic reform in education to provide equitable access to education, such as free primary and secondary public education (Cohen & Methta, 2017). At the same time and notwithstanding the significant success of these reforms, inequities persist, sometimes exacerbated by local policies affecting schools and classrooms that limit access to valuable opportunities to learn based on race, language, or other characteristics that do not represent the culture or values of majority or dominant populations. Teachers and school personnel are seen as essential in offering access to opportunities to learn and helping maintain equity in classrooms; however, in many instances, educators are not prepared to teach culturally and linguistically diverse populations. Regional and local policies also restrict teachers. For instance, as of 2023, Arizona is the only state in the U.S. with English-only education legislation still in effect through its law known as Proposition 203, which poses obstacles to equitable education for English language learners (ELLs), especially immigrants and their teachers. “Justice can take equity one step further by fixing the systems in a way that leads to long-term, sustainable, equitable access for generations to come” (Erdmann, 2021, p.1). Consequently, “teaching for equity and justice requires educators having a systemic and structural understanding of the inequities in our society, a personal commitment to challenging these injustices, and provoking or facilitating a local response” (Sadler, 2023, p. 1). In our forthcoming book, we describe an M.Ed. in Global Education designed to help teachers and educators learn how to engage in action research for equity. I direct this program with the support of Arizona State University faculty. The program aims to enable teachers to collect valid evidence to challenge policies and school cultures perpetuating inequities.
Teachers and school personnel are essential in offering access to opportunities to learn and helping maintain equity in classrooms; however, in many instances, educators are not prepared to teach culturally and linguistically diverse populations. National, regional, and local policies also restrict teachers’ attempts at creating equitable classrooms.
LtC: What is a core issue/challenge you are grappling with in your work related to systems equity and social justice?
I see effective teacher education and development as an equity and fairness issue—future teachers enroll in teacher education expecting to be prepared to be education professionals, and parents enroll their children in schools expecting that well-prepared teachers will teach them—all children with no exceptions. Lack of well-prepared, knowledgeable teachers affects teaching and instruction: how teachers interpret and implement the curriculum and how well they can address the needs of their students in an intellectually ambitious and humane way. Such a vision has proven difficult to realize in the U.S. and other countries, with notable and worth-studying exceptions. My work attends to these concerns by focusing on several core issues:
- How can teacher education systems prepare knowledgeable and effective future and early career teachers?
My scholarship on the outcomes of teacher education, teacher learning, and transitions into teaching is manifest in two large international research projects focusing on teacher education, teacher learning, and transitions into teaching [the Teacher Education and Development Study in Mathematics (TEDS-M), and the First Five Years of Mathematics Teaching – Proof-of-Concept Study (FIRSTMATH)]. The projects involved collaborating with colleagues in 17 and 12 countries, investigating system-level policies affecting elementary and secondary teachers’ preparation, knowledge acquisition, and teaching methods. The findings revealed that highly knowledgeable mathematics teachers exist in systems that have developed robust accreditation systems and require future teachers to demonstrate deep knowledge of their subject and pedagogy. However, teachers often lack knowledge of teaching culturally diverse students and critical tools to promote equity (e.g., formative assessment and action research) (Tatto et al., 2012; Tatto et al., 2018; Tatto et al., 2020).
- How can teacher educators and teachers contribute strong evidence to shape the field and inform effective policies and practices in teaching and teacher education?
My work on the links between research, policy, and practice in pursuing equity in teacher education resulted in a joint collaborative project with colleagues in the Department of Education at the University of Oxford, England. Our studies explored the impact of market models in education on the preparation of future teachers in the U.S. and England, revealing that the goals of teacher preparation have shifted from a humanistic curriculum to a test-based approach, causing teachers to compromise between student needs and accountability demands and negatively affecting teacher recruitment and retention (Tatto et al., 2018). A follow-up study sought to understand the intersection and evolution of knowledge, policy, and practice in teacher education across nations, showing that resistance or acceptance of market approaches is mediated by the management of accountability systems in each nation (Tatto & Menter, 2019).
- How can teacher educators and teachers contribute strong evidence to shape the field and inform effective policies and practices in teaching and teacher education?
An essential challenge teacher education programs face is helping teachers develop applied research skills to monitor and improve their practice to effectively foster equitable access to learning opportunities. My work in this area encourages the education profession to attend to diverse epistemologies, theoretical perspectives, and methodologies to enrich teacher education, teaching, and learning (Tatto, 2021a). Another key challenge is helping teachers learn how to implement responsive teaching strategies (e.g., formative assessments) to prevent students from falling behind. The argument here is that the accountability movement has diminished the importance of teachers’ knowledge and implementation of responsive teaching strategies (e.g., formative assessment). These findings should prompt the profession to reimagine action research and assessment’s role in teacher education for adequate and equitable teaching and learning (Tatto, 2021 a, c).
- How do we find synergies between local needs to educate all students and global movements in education to offer teacher preparation for sustainable, equitable practices?
Substantial synergies to promote inclusive and equitable quality education opportunities for all learners can be obtained by exploring the potential of promising global movements such as UNESCO’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDG4). This would require the profession to agree on definitions and measurements of global indicators for successful, equitable teacher education, teaching, and learning by moving from easy-to-measure indicators to more meaningful ones. Such an effort would require a thoughtful examination of professionalism in teaching and teacher education (Tatto, 2021b). In my work, I use psychological and sociological frameworks to explore how recontextualizing agents struggle to dominate the construction and interpretation of professionalism in teaching, concluding that the education field must develop the capacity to ensure teachers’ professional learning, informed by use-inspired research and an inquiry culture in university-based teacher education programs (Tatto, 2021b; Tatto, 2021c).
LtC: What can researchers and practitioners of educational change learn from your work?
MTT: I aim to provide insights for scholars and practitioners studying equity-oriented educational reform via my contributions to the comparative study of pre-service teacher education, focusing on collaborative capacity development and evidence-based decision-making. My work on teacher education systems examines the challenges and possibilities of promoting equity in teacher education and teaching. My research emphasizes the need to rethink the future of teacher education curricula to support professionalism in the education field.
My work also highlights the complexity and interconnectedness of teacher education programs, such as differences in programs’ nature and effects, the socializing effect of normative cohesive teacher education on teachers’ beliefs, and challenges associated with education reform, including understanding how such reforms affect teachers’ perceptions of roles, practices, and goals of education. (Tatto, 1996; Rodriguez, Tatto, et al., 2018).
My research suggests solutions for the problems various national teacher education programs face, emphasizing the need for national and regional policies that support programs’ collaborative curricular change and strengthen teachers’ knowledge, research skills, and collaboration networks.
I also stress the importance of resolving contradictions and conflicts surrounding education reform through well-informed practice and policy. By focusing on these topics, I hope to provide insightful analysis of possible solutions to the intricate problems that teacher education systems face worldwide.
About the Interviewees:
Dr. Amelia Peterson is Associate Professor and Head of Learning and Teaching at the London Interdisciplinary School, where she leads work developing new curricula based around the integration of Arts and Sciences. She was previously part of the first cohort of Harvard University’s PhD in Education, where her dissertation focused on assessment and qualification reforms. She has taught in a variety of settings including a large UK secondary school and at the London School of Economics, and has worked on education projects both in the UK and internationally, including for the World Innovation Summit on Education (WISE), the OECD, and the Brookings Institution. She is on the Advisory Group of Rethinking Assessment and for many years was a facilitator for the Global Education Leaders’ Partnership.
Maria Teresa Tatto is a renowned comparative education expert at Arizona State University, focusing on teacher education systems and the intersection of research, policy, and practice to create more equitable and accessible educational opportunities for disadvantaged populations. She has created a theoretical framework to analyze the relationships between teacher preparation research, policy, and practice and has authored 17 books, over 100 journal articles, and book chapters. Tatto is a former president of the Comparative and International Education Society, an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Oxford, a Fellow of Kellogg College, Oxford, an Honorary Visiting Professor at the UCL – IoE, and a Visiting Professor at the University of Bath, England. She is also a Fellow of the American Educational Research Association.
References (AP):
Peterson, A. (2020). The Road Less Travelled: The Decline of Vocational Pathways and Variety of Hybridization Across Four Countries, 1995-2016 [Harvard University]. https://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/37365787
Yurkofsky, M. M., Peterson, A., Mehta, J. D., Horwitz-Willis, R., & Frumin, K. (2020). Research on continuous improvement: Exploring the complexities of managing educational change. Review of Research in Education, 44(1), 403–433. https://doi.org/10.3102/0091732X20907363
References (MTT):
AECF (Annie E. Casey Foundation), (2014). Race, Equity and Inclusion Action Guide. https://assets.aecf.org/m/resourcedoc/AECF_EmbracingEquity7Steps-2014.pdf
Cohen, D. K., & Mehta, J.D. (2017). Why reform sometimes succeeds: Understanding the conditions that produce reforms that last. American Educational Research Journal, 54(4), 644-690. https://doi.org/10.3102/0002831217700078
Erdmann, N. (2021). Defining: Equity, Equality and Justice. Achieve News. https://achievebrowncounty.org/2021/05/defining-equity-equality-and-justice/
Oxford English Dictionary (2023). Equity. Oxford Languages. Oxford University Press.
Sadler, R. (2023). 5 ways to ground your teaching in equity and justice. Facing History & Ourselves. https://www.facinghistory.org/ideas-wee/5-ways-ground-your-teaching-equity-justice
Tatto, M. T. & Brown, L. (Eds.) (in press). Empowering Teachers for Equitable and Sustainable Education: Action Research, Teacher Agency, and Online Community. Routledge.
Tatto, M. T. (in press). Empowering Teachers for Sustainable and Equitable Education: Program Philosophy, Theoretical Bases, and Pedagogy. In M.T. Tatto & L. Brown (Eds.), Empowering Teachers for Equitable and Sustainable Education: Action Research, Teacher Agency, and Online Community. Routledge (in press).
Tatto, M. T., Schwille, J., Senk, S. L., Ingvarson, L., Rowley, G., Peck, R., Bankov, K., Rodriguez, M. & Reckase, M. (2012). Policy, Practice, and Readiness to Teach Primary and Secondary Mathematics in 17 Countries. Findings from the IEA Teacher Education and Development Study in Mathematics (TEDS-M). Amsterdam: International Association for the Evaluation of Student Achievement.
Tatto, M.T. & Brown, L. (Eds.), Empowering Teachers for Equitable and Sustainable Education: Action Research, Teacher Agency, and Online Community. Routledge (in press).
Tatto, M.T. (1996). Examining values and beliefs about teaching diverse students: Understanding the challenges for teacher education. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 18, 155-180. https://doi.org/10.2307/1164554
Tatto, M.T. (1998). The influence of teacher education on teachers’ beliefs about purposes of education, roles, and practice. Journal of Teacher Education, 49, 66-77. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022487198049001008
Tatto, M.T. (1999). The socializing influence of normative cohesive teacher education on teachers’ beliefs about instructional choice. Teachers and Teaching, 5, 111-134. https://doi.org/10.1080/1354060990050106
Tatto, M.T. (2021a). Developing teachers’ research capacity: The essential role of teacher education. Teaching Education, 32 (1), 27-46. https://doi.org/10.1080/10476210.2020.1860000
Tatto, M.T. (2021b). Comparative Research on teachers and teacher education: Global perspectives to inform UNESCO’S SDG 4 Agenda. Oxford Review of Education, 47 (1), 25-44. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03054985.2020.1842183
Tatto, M.T. (2021c). Professionalism in teaching and teacher education. European Journal of Teacher Education, 44 (1), 20-44. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/02619768.2020.1849130
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