Designing Emerging and Responsive Teacher Education

This proposed presentation will focus on a professional development (PD) workshop developed with and for early childhood teachers to promote STEAM (interdisciplinary teaching/learning of science, technology, engineering, arts, math) competencies. The workshop was co-generated and co-taught five times during 2023 by a team of six in-service teachers and six researchers at the SciTeach Center (University of Luxembourg).
The aim of this research is to examine the emerging structure of the PD workshop. We use researcher’s observation notes, post-workshop questionnaires, and interviews with co-teachers of the workshop as research data and approach its analysis through critical ethnography and event-oriented inquiry to explore how the workshop evolved over time and what resulted from it.
Following the analysis, we conclude that the evolution of the workshop was influenced by 1. The team of co-teachers, 2. The responses of the participants, 3. The outcomes of the previous workshops, 4. The available resources and materials. These influenced the workshop in a contextually-responsive way that connected it to the needs of the field, and we will detail these findings to argue that due to (and not despite of) these influences and changes the workshop's goals of promoting STEAM competencies had been consistently achieved.
Overall, we argue that a clear yet open emerging structural foundation supports contextually-responsive PD workshops that are both teacher-centered (embracing the plurality of co-teachers’ experiences) and learner-centered (embracing the diverse groups and their needs), while being deeply rooted in educational and national contexts.